Fleshless Dream
by blackberet
Summary: Love her or hate her, Olivia Ofrenda is one of the most unique and eyecatching characters in Grim Fandango. But we've never known much about her--until now.
1. Ashes to Ashes

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
Fleshless Dream  
  
by flame mage  
  
part I  
  
first stanza: ashes to ashes  
  
**********  
  
"Ashes to ashes  
  
...to ashes  
  
to ashes...  
  
...to ashes  
  
to ashes...  
  
...to ashes  
  
to ashes...  
  
to me...  
  
...to ashes  
  
to ashes...  
  
...to ashes  
  
to ashes..."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "Ashes to Ashes"  
  
**********  
  
The cigarette was burning to cinders at the end of its holder. With a final dying spark, it gave out and fizled, dropping ashes like water onto the paper.  
  
I cursed and slammed down the pen. Getting any work done would be impossible today. Contemplatively, I strode to the window and leaned over the sill to look out. It was unusually warm for New York in early November. Most of the leaves had already surrendered and scattered to the four winds, but there were still a few survivors clinging in golden-red regalia to a few hardened branches.  
  
As usual, I was still thinking in lines. "No more Shakespearean trash," I ordered myself. For now, I was free to write whatever I wanted. My new boyfriend had certainly taken care of that. I ran one freshly-manicured fingernail through perfectly-styled hair as I glanced around the suite again. Silk sheets and upholstery, beautiful hardwood furnishings, and a closet containing the best clothing and jewels money could buy in the mid-1970s. All of it provided by my darling boyfriend out of his love for the trophy woman who would occupy those rooms.  
  
I never had any qualms about what I was doing. If someone had been to ask me, I would have given my customary rich laugh in that silken husky voice of mine and asked, "why?" I see it as a career, just as writing or accounting or killing is a career. My mercenary attitude was a great attribute in my profession; my most recent lover had, in fact, been a mob boss. As far as I was concerned, outdated morals only got in the way of survival. And I had always made it her goal not just to survive, but to thrive.  
  
The pack of imported French cigarettes, a kind I'd developed an intense craving for during my years in Paris, was still sitting on the desk. I tapped one out into the palm of my hand and ignited it with the gold-plated lighter in the second drawer from the top. I needed another nicotine infusion. When Reuben got back, I'd have to entertain him for a while before I could coax him out for dinner. I felt like lobster tonight.  
  
Suddenly I heard a loud banging noise out in the hallway. I raised an eyebrow and turned back toward the window, but when it persisted I stalked in annoyance over to the apartment door and threw it open. "Keep it down out there," I demanded imperiously. "I can't work like this."  
  
"Good. I hoped you wouldn't be able to," said a voice from the hallway. I whirled and stared at the man standing directly outside my door. My ex-boyfriend. Still wearing the broad-shouldered Italian designer suits to try to hide what a little man he was. He was standing with those shoulders squared in the hallway, a large package resting against the wall behind him.  
  
"Giuseppe," I breathed, balancing one hand on my hip. "I'm not sure what you're doing here, but I think we've been through this enough times. It's over."  
  
"I agree, Olivia. It is." He stepped to one side, Italian leather shoes carefully avoiding the large package on the floor behind him. Then he was out of the way and I got a better look at what I had thought was a package. It was actually a man sitting slumped on the plush floor. His expensive silk suit was stained a vibrant red. He was very, very dead.  
  
It was only then that I realized it was Reuben.  
  
"You've always had quite a reputation for playing your cards right," Giuseppe said smoothly from the hallway, stepping back and breaking into my thoughts. "Sinking your teeth into one man after the other, always moving up the food chain. You even knew when...say, informing on a high-ranking member of the Family...? would help you in your eternal climb. This time, though, my darling, your choice was very, very wrong. *Dead* wrong, I should say."  
  
I didn't wait for him to get the gun out before I turned and ran. With one high heel, I smashed through the window, spraying glass down into the street eighteen stories below, and swung myself outside and onto the fire escape. One desperate glance upward told me that he was leaning out the window and aiming at me. But Giuseppe was a boss, not a legman, and his aim had never been perfect. I could outrun him. I took a deep breath, brought my legs out to the sides of the ladder, and slid down without bothering to use the rungs.  
  
The shots were going wild all around me when I hit the ground, but he wasn't anywhere near me. I reached for my gun and jerked it free from the tape keeping it pressed to the inside of my thigh. Now I was at the back of the building. On the other side was Central Park. I could run to the inner backstreets, but Giuseppe knew them as well as I did, and I knew he would find me sooner or later. My only option was to make it down to the Majestic. The doorman owed me a favor.  
  
Gunshots rang out behind me. I looked back wildly, but I couldn't see Giuseppe anywhere. I fired back blindly over my right shoulder, tearing like a madwoman down the street. I could see the door of the Majestic at the very edge of my vision. My muscles were burning, and just as I reached the doorway--  
  
--a searing pain shot through my back and I pitched faceforward to collapse into the street. A black limousine rolled past me. Through the tinted window, I could just make out the face of Antony, Giuseppe's right-hand man.  
  
Damn, damn, damn.  
  
I fired limply at the windshield, but my shot went as wild as Giuseppe's and my hand fell back onto the pavement. I could barely think beyond the pain. Everything was going black.  
  
"I'll never play my cards wrong again," I swore bitterly through crimson lips as one last golden-red leaf fluttered down onto my face. It was autumn in New York. I was dead. 


	2. Crazy Dead

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
Please note that all poems attributed to Olivia Ofrenda are taken from the game unless otherwise noted in the chapter disclaimer. I have taken the liberty of titling untitled poems contained in the game, including the one used in this chapter.  
  
Fleshless Dream  
  
by flame mage  
  
part I  
  
second stanza: crazy dead  
  
**********  
  
"Alive!  
  
We slept!  
  
Life's just some rapid-eye movement  
  
in a warm, cozy bed...  
  
Buried!  
  
We wake!  
  
The flesh dream is over, daddy  
  
Now that we're all crazy dead."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "Crazy Dead"  
  
**********  
  
I reflected sardonically how inappropriate it would be to say that I felt afraid for the first time in my life, considering the fact that I was undeniably dead.  
  
I was still adjusting to that. I probably wouldn't have believed it if two very strong pieces of evidence hadn't convinced me: one, I remembered being shot in the back by Giuseppe's men very clearly, and two, I no longer had skin.  
  
Or hair, or eyes, or anything else that would mark me as human. When I'd first opened my eyes into the late afternoon sunlight of a New York street, I'd railed in frustration at the vision of the Grim Reaper standing before me, beckoning, yelled at him that this must be a prank, when my boyfriend got his hands on him he was gonna tear him to pieces--no, wait, *I'd* do it first. In an entire lifetime, I couldn't remember ever losing control, and I'd done it within minutes of my death. All of a sudden, I remembered Reuben's corpse in the hallway, and that was the moment when I looked down and realized that I was a skeleton. I think that was when it finally hit me. I wrote "Ashes to Ashes" standing on that street, watching the magazine-cutout people passing me by.  
  
The reaper introduced himself as Domino Hurley and helped me into a sleek black car he had waiting. Staring out the window, watching New York pass me by for the last time, I realized what I had to do. I didn't know anything about wherever I was headed, but if I still had some kind of consciousness, then the rules of the game hadn't changed. Survive. Do whatever you have to.  
  
And step over anyone you have to.  
  
As soon as that hit me, I regained my composure, and he handed me a a pair of tailored slacks and a black turtleneck. "I had Eva send these up as soon as I heard about your case," he told me. "You might feel a little better in something that feels more familiar. It's difficult to get used to at first."  
  
He explained the system to me in a matter of minutes with the practiced ease of a salesman. My ultimate destination was the Ninth Underworld, the Land of Eternal Rest, but to get there I had to make a journey through the Eighth Underworld. Depending on the aesthetic qualities of my life (his words, not mine; like all salesmen, he had something of the poet in his way of putting things delicately), I might be given the opportunity to make this journey easier by purchasing "travel packages." The entire spiel was blissfully surreal.  
  
When I first saw El Marrow looming on the horizon, I thought the driver had changed his mind and was taking me back to New York. It was only when I got closer that I realized the resemblance was only superficial. The skyscrapers were there, but given their construction, the best earthly approximation I could give would be a highly stylized version of what might have happened had the Aztecs retained Mexico City in the twentieth century. Our journey ended in a large, dingy parking garage not unlike the ones I was used to. The reaper took my arm, shifting his scythe to his other hand, and escorted me into an upholstered elevator for a 56-story flight upwards.  
  
We got off in what appeared to be a regular office building--the executive floor, a virtual carbon copy of the luxurious but nondescript ones where my lovers had always worked. The secretary directly across from the elevator was banging away on an old Remington-Rand typewriter, and her bloodred hair and gaudy blue dress reminded me of what I must look like, a collection of bones in someone else's clothes and a skull etched with some ghost of the dark bob I'd once prized. I was also completely lacking in cigarettes, I realized, staring in envy at the one she gripped between her index and middle fingers.  
  
"This way, Ms. Ofrenda," the reaper said, ushering me along down the hallway into a small office near the end. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions, and I'd love to help you find some answers." He slid the door open smoothly and pulled a plush chair out from the front side of the desk before settling comfortably into his own seat on the opposite side. "Anything at all you'd like to know before we get this party started?"  
  
I detected something in his voice beyond the rehearsed sympathy of a salesman and knew instantly that the man was mine for the taking. I didn't know who he was, but I had a feeling that getting on his good side might be to my advantage in the not-too-distant future. "Okay, Ofrenda, you spent a lifetime doing this," I told myself. "Time to turn on the waterworks."  
  
"Listen, Mr..." I began slowly, looking plaintively up at him.  
  
"Hurley," he supplied. He rested a bony hand on my arm. "Domino Hurley."  
  
"Hurley," I continued. "I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but there must be some mistake. I...I can't be dead. My...my boyfriend was just shot by Giuseppi Caggiano. I have to go to the police. I have to make funeral arrangements. I have to...oh, God, Reuben!" I buried my face in my hands, intensely aware of the clicking sound the motion made. "What am I going to do?"  
  
In answer, Domino Hurley spun around and ran his long fingers through the elaborate filing system behind the desk and selected a manilla folder. He rifled briefly through its contents, set it down, and leaned forward on his elbows on the desk to look at me.  
  
"Nice try, Ms. Ofrenda," he said.  
  
I kept up the dewy facade until I figured out what he was trying to pull. This wasn't in the script. "What...what are you talking about?"  
  
"You don't fool me. Now, these kids here think I'm an honest, straight-up kinda guy, but I've been a grifter a long time, and I know one when I see one. I'm not sure what you're trying to pull, but whatever you want, you're not gonna get it that way."  
  
I laughed. The guy was sharp. "Well, looks like I'll have to try a different tack," I mused out loud with a feral smile. "Tell me, Mr. Grifter, what works on you?"  
  
"Not much," he replied. "Definitely not in your case. Remember the travel-package system I explained on the way over?"  
  
"Vividly."  
  
"You're my type, so I'll be candid with you here. According to your file, Ms. Ofrenda, you're not exactly a candidate for the Number Nine. You want to get to the Ninth Underworld, you're walking. And you're pretty lucky to get off with that."  
  
"What, you cats don't have a subway?" I raised an eyebrow at him. "Tell me you at least have cigarettes here."  
  
"No fancy holders, but I've been saving these for you." He slid a pack of Lucky Strikes across the desk and I ripped into it eagerly. "I don't smoke," he told me conversationally, nonetheless removing a lighter from somewhere in his robes and holding it out to me. "Gotta keep this hunk of bones in shape, you know?"  
  
"Does it matter?" I asked, a little surprised. "You don't have lungs."  
  
Hurley leaned back and put his feet up on the desk. "I lied to you when I said I'd love to answer your questions. First rule of the Land of the Dead: don't ask them. Now, I'd like to help you out, Ms. Ofrenda, but my only suggestion to you is to start walking."  
  
I looked at him hard. He was sitting there casually in the office chair, one arm draped languidly over the side, and he was watching me with the same catlike expression I'd trained on so many men during my lifetime. A grifter. I dug on that one for a second, let it sink in. He wasn't as smart as I was, but whatever was in that file had given him a healthy respect for my lifestyle. I could work him.  
  
"No, Mr. Hurley, I don't think it is," I shot back, leaning back in a mirror image of him and dragging on the cigarette. "You call us grifters. You're insulting me, but we'll ignore that for now. Here's my point: if you really do know how to play the game, then you know that bending the rules is part of it. I think you can get me in somewhere." If we'd had eyes, they would have locked for a second of electric charge. "Am I right?"  
  
He looked hard back at me for a long time, and then a broad smile spread across his skull. "You know," he told me, standing up and coming around behind me to lay his hands on my shoulders. "I think you are."  
  
*****  
  
I left the office a few hours later, invigorated by the exercise and as ready as I'd ever be to see what death had in store for me. Hurley's driver, a massive blue hulk the reaper had casually informed me was an elemental demon, already had the car waiting for me.  
  
We sat in silence for the duration of the trip. The car, I had learned, was custom- designed to reach higher speeds than other LOD vehicles, which easily outstripped anything available at the time in the LOL. Despite this, the 1020 kilometer journey to the next point in my journey still took several hours.  
  
According to Hurley, this point was a port city called Rubacava. In its heyday, it would be a hotspot for nightclubs, but when I first knew it it was a sleepy little fog town where everyone was just marking time until they could afford passage across the Sea of Lament. He told me to do there what I did best: find someone and not let go until I found a higher bidder.  
  
As loath as I am to admit it, a pang of fear shot down my spine when I slammed the door of that car shut behind me and stepped out into the misty Rubacava morning for the first time. Hurley had given me a small wad of cash and told me it would be enough to get me a room until I could get a man, but when I climbed the stone steps up to the automat on the hill near the entrance to town, I saw myself in the polished glass window and almost gagged. I stalked the streets of Rubacava until I found boots, a trenchcoat, gloves, leggings, sunglasses, and a beret until I could almost convince myself that I looked like I was alive, and then I got a room at a little hotel that I'd later bulldoze to make room for the Blue Casket.  
  
**********  
  
Author's Notes:  
  
Everyone who reads this, I dare you: go write a GF fic. Go write several. Let's breathe some life into this place!  
  
Thanks to everyone who's read and reviewed so far--especially Vampire Naomi. I'm actually a big admirer of your GF stories, and everything you've written about Olivia really made me want to try my own hand at it.  
  
As for when Olivia would have lived, in this version she was somewhere in her late thirties or early forties when she died in the mid-1970s. As for when and where her heyday was...well, maybe we'll find out... 


	3. First Bite

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
"First Bite" is an original work about the opening of the Blue Casket. Not enough poems are presented in the game, so I'm attempting a pastiche of the Ofrenda style here.  
  
Fleshless Dream  
  
by flame mage  
  
part I  
  
third stanza: first bite  
  
**********  
  
"sssssss--  
  
the hiss of the breeze over pebbles.  
  
Smear the monochrome night with seagrass,  
  
Open the sky for one more star.  
  
Break down the door.  
  
Tonight,  
  
in eternity, I taste eternity.  
  
It's the first bite."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "First Bite"  
  
**********  
  
Those years when Rubacava and I were climbing the ladder together have spanned together and hazed out in my head. Twenty years feels like forever, but I see those years as marking time. I moved out of the cheap florescent hotel and into an endless succession of men's arms. Most of them are long gone, but I doubt I'd recognize any of them if I saw them on the street. They were immaterial background noise, just a meal ticket to waste time with until I hit paydirt.  
  
My chance came the night I met Maximino. He arrived in Rubacava a few years after I did and opened the gates at the cat track only a few years after that with all the money he'd saved not buying travel packages from the DOD--not that he would have qualified for any of them anyway. He wasn't big on mingling with the peons, though, so it wasn't until I was finally accepted into the upper echelon of Rubacava's society that my then-boyfriend was granted a pass to the High Roller's Lounge of Feline Meadows and escorted me to a party there one night. As soon as I saw Max for the first time, I knew it was over. I was going to reach the top at last, and I wouldn't even have to lift a finger to do it.  
  
That was my first impression of Max: a pushover. Like Caesar, the best way to flatter him was to tell him he couldn't be flattered. An almost flawless facsimile of so many other men I'd eaten through like acid before: a wallet and body that were both overblown and balanced out by a small brain, and an ego that maintained its massive proportions only through constant stroking. But he was the king of Rubacava, and in the next few years he'd not only put its name and mine on the map--he'd set them side by side in lights so the entire Land of the Dead would see them.  
  
It wasn't difficult; it never is. When my boyfriend waded through the shining sea of beautiful people to greet Max, I put myself directly into the kingpin's line of vision. He stopped and turned toward me, and from then on in it was the same old game.  
  
"I've seen your face before," he said, "but I've never known your name."  
  
"Olivia," I purred, extending my hand. "Olivia Ofrenda."  
  
"Maximino," he replied as he gave it a firm shake. "I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of you around here."  
  
By the next weekend I was his lover.  
  
We kept it secret for a long time, but it wasn't long at all before I managed to let it slip that I'd always wanted a club of my own. Max did things fast. The next day, the deal was signed and sealed, and I was overseeing the bulldozing and ground-breaking of the property. Max funneled the money to me under the table, and I was working with his top assistants to design the beat scene of my dreams in the heart of Rubacava. The flow was almost limitless, and from the ground up I created hundreds of feet of soaring backlit glass and steel--and then went underground.  
  
It was then that I first met Nick Virago. He was Max's personal lawyer, but it was a position he had attained by working for a succession of increasingly wealthy men until I reached the top. Given the parallels, it was inevitable that we should hate each other. What followed was even more inevitable.  
  
It had been a long time coming, but things finally came to a head one night a few weeks before the club opened. The power and water services had been turned on only slightly earlier, and I had already moved into my suite in the back. I was there alone late one night, working, when I heard a loud rapping echoing from the outside of the thick double doors at the club's entrance and opened them to find the lawyer leaning against the exterior wall, briefcase in hand.  
  
"Nick Virago," I greeted him smoothly. "Get that silk tie out of here; you'll infect the place with bourgeois."  
  
He didn't wait for an invitation and brushed past me into the club, surveying his surroundings. "I would think you'd enjoy that," he replied dryly.  
  
"I don't like to mix business and pleasure," I told him, slamming the door shut and standing just a hair closer behind him than was necessary.  
  
"Glad to hear it." As he said it, he took two steps away from me and clicked his briefcase open. Then he turned to look at me. "I'm all business."  
  
I laughed and perched on top of the nearest table. "I might have made an exception in your case. What really brings you to the party, Virago?"  
  
"This." He withdrew a sheaf of papers from the briefcase and held them up. "Some final licensing issues before you open. Chief Bogen wants them in hand by nine AM."  
  
I held my hand out for the papers and flipped through them. "Then I'll take my time."  
  
He scoffed impatiently. "Just sign on the dotted line, Olivia."  
  
"Don't insult me, Nick. That's not how I do business."  
  
"I've heard how you do business." I could feel the friction in the air now. Had we had eyes, they would have set off sparks in the dark stillness of the empty room. The ceiling soared more than three stories overhead, but I felt like the space was shrinking. He was staring at me.  
  
"Oh?" I responded coolly.  
  
Was that a glare? "Your business IS pleasure."  
  
"And what's your business, Nick?" I took two steps forward and regained the ground he'd put between us.  
  
"*Max's* business," he said pointedly.  
  
"Which makes me your business too, doesn't it?" He didn't have anything to say to that one for the moment, and I laughed again. "Why don't you step into my office for a few minutes while I look these over?" With that I swished back through the club to my suite. He followed at a distance.  
  
"Your office and your bedroom are the same room?" he asked when he reached the doorway. I'd already installed myself at my desk and was rapidly deciphering Legalese.  
  
I glanced at him over my glasses with a challenging smile. "Business and pleasure once again. Seems to be a recurring theme tonight, doesn't it?"  
  
He ran one finger under his collar so unsubtly I realized it was subconscious. "It's always a recurring theme with you."  
  
At that, I stood up slowly and pivoted to face him. "Why not make it one with you as well?"  
  
It was all the coaxing he needed. Seconds later his arms closed around me for the first time. The paperwork made it to Bogen at 8:57 the next morning.  
  
*****  
  
It was during this period that Rubacava really began to grow. Whatever else one could say about Max, he knew how to bring in a crowd, and he did--the masses and the bourgeoisie alike. The fog in the mornings began to burn off into the neon nightlife in which I would thrive for more than a decade.  
  
The club rolled on toward completion over the next weeks--it had already set a new record for construction speed in Rubacava--while I stirred up clientele. I'd been publishing since I arrived in the LOD--first all I could remember of what I hadn't made public before my death, and then chapbook after chapbook of new work. As a result, I'd already attracted a decent base, and the beat little coffee shops and alleyways of the city yielded everything else I needed. Minimal cover charge, just enough to keep the lights on and the drinks coming. The real meat of the club--the poetry readings--was all mine for the taking.  
  
The night the Blue Casket opened was one of the best of my afterlife. As blase as I am, I can still remember the chill that shot down my spinal cord like a bullet on ice when I stepped out onto the third-story balcony as the sun set and looked down at the sea of black and white swelling outside the doors of the club. Turning the lights on for the first time, parting those human waters with a beacon of rich blues and greens...I must have written a hundred poems about it in the years to come before I gave up. I never got it right.  
  
And it was nothing compared to stepping downstairs, pushing open the huge heavy doors, and standing spotlighted alone on the stage as the deluge rushed inward.  
  
A few minutes later, the place was jammed from the railings to the rafters with turtlenecks and shades. My inaugural reading of "Grim Fandango" drove the crowds into such a passionate frenzy that they nearly clawed the stage down. The coffee and booze were flowing like water, and the place hung thick with cigarette smoke. I'd expected nothing less.  
  
And the years flowed too, and gradually life stabilized and hit a pattern. For the first time since my death I always knew where my next meal was coming from. Even without Max, I might have become a very wealthy woman, but his cash meant that the slightest desire was within my grasp instantly. My private apartment in the Casket was stocked with the best wines money could buy, my turtlenecks were upgraded from cotton to cashmere, and the first airship to grace the skies of the Eighth Underworld had my name on it.  
  
I reaped the benefits of being Max's girl every day, and when he bored me his laywer was at my beck and call. I was only toying with Nick Virago and he knew it, but he didn't care. It was all about that play, the thrill of the chase. One Day of the Dead more than thirty years after my death, the two of us even snuck back to El Marrow for the festival. We arrived back in Rubacava at the same time as the ex-reaper Manny Calavera--Calavera, who would make my life a dead hell not too far in the future.  
  
And a year after that is where my story really begins. 


	4. Boney

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
Okay, cats and kits, part two here. Fast forward to the Dia de los Muertos in Year Two, when Manny's in Rubacava. And so the real story begins...  
  
_Fleshless Dream_  
  
by flame mage  
  
part II  
  
first stanza: boney

* * *

"I called my cat Boney  
'Til she said it wouldn't do.  
I said 'why?' She said, 'Sister,  
'That's what I've been calling you.'"  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "Boney"

* * *

I slithered my way back into the black turtleneck, brushing off the dust specks it had picked up during the brief period when it was on the floor; Nick wasn't a big one for taking things slowly. I glanced back briefly over my wire-rimmed shades at the man who served as my boyfriend's legal counsel--and a few other things for me. He was idly smoking a cigarette with my holder and watching me, having made no move to leave the bed. I walked over to retrieve my trench from the headboard and held out my hand for the holder, rubbing a bony finger against a fleshless thumb until he handed it to me. I shrugged on the coat, removing a tube of lipstick from the left pocket while smoking the cancer stick held in my right and running over my mental checklist of things to knock out of the way throughout the rest of the night. I'd have to go out and shmooze with the customers, maybe get the poetry readings started. It had been almost midnight when I'd ducked into the back room, and the stage was still empty. So much for open mic night--I'd have to fix that.  
  
Oh, yes, and sometime this evening I'd have to pay a visit to Max.  
  
"What's the point of the cigarette holder anyway, darling?" Nick asked, throwing off the black satin sheets and striding over. I hooked one bare skeletal toe into his discarded pants and kicked them back to him. He caught them deftly and started to put them on. "For that matter, what's the point of the cigarette? We don't have lungs anymore."  
  
"Why so existential all of a sudden?" I asked, taking a long drag of the smoke and pouting freshly-crimson lips to blow it back at him. Asking why or how we could still smoke opened up a new dimension of uncertainty that I didn't want to have to deal with--questions like why I still bothered with lipstick or sex or drinking or any of the other worldly pleasures I'd indulged in there in the Underworld. Those questions brought me dangerously close to the question of why I still bothered existing at all. And the truth was that for once, I, the illustrious Olivia Ofrenda, had no unearthly idea.  
  
Well, maybe I had just a few.  
  
What I was doing, at the time, was running a nightclub in Rubacava. Next to El Marrow, it was the largest city in the Eighth Underworld, and if El Marrow was our answer to la Nueva York, Rubacava was the Las Vegas of the damned. The Blue Casket, however, catered to a very select clientele: those poetic seekers of beauty and truth who had been collared with the term "beatniks" by the success of Kerouac and company in the 1950s.  
  
These days, it was home primarily to Ginsberg clones and disgruntled working-class supporters of the Communist Party who advocated revolution for everything from labor unrest to humidity, but at least it was a regular crowd. They, like everyone else in Rubacava, had long since given up on moving on to the final destination of eternal rest.  
  
Which brings me to my major point of unhealthy stress that night: they, I, and everyone else in Rubacava were all dead.  
  
Life had never really surprised me. I'd hated those prim-skirted, kerchiefed Girl Scouts with a passion, but I'd understood their creed: be prepared. As a result, I'd always had a cool head and an uncanny ability to handle myself in any situation. But I have to admit, even I was thrown just a little off when I opened my eyes to find that I didn't have any. I was a fleshless, faceless collection of pearl-white bones suspended by some invisible thread.  
  
By that particular night, of course, I'd gotten used to it. Time is evanescent in the Eighth Underworld. This is especially true in Rubacava, a town where life is lived from dusk to dawn, although by this time I'd been there for years. I was a step ahead of my patrons, though. Unlike them, I had a game plan--and the skills and equipment to play that game.  
  
Nick Virago, who was merely a pawn in that game--albeit a conveniently-placed one--slid the last button of his claret-colored shirt through its hole and reached for his tie. "Just wondering, darling. It's the Day of the Dead, if you'll recall."  
  
"You don't have a sentimental bone in your body, Nick; where's this coming from?" I scoffed, picking up the beret and adjusting it at a slight angle on my skull.  
  
"I really should keep this to myself, but a recent business proposal has me thinking." He had his jacket on by this time. "Suffice it to say that moving onto my eternal reward might be a little easier than I'd been led to believe."  
  
This takes a little explanation. Souls die and are whisked away to the Department of Death, where the good ones are given opportunities to buy their way out of the customary four- year journey to the Ninth Underworld. Which, for anyone naive enough to believe it, is the Land of Eternal Rest. The better--although I must say those fools at the DOD have some fairly convoluted ways of judging such an abstract idea--a soul was, the easier and shorter his trip. For the rest of us...  
  
"Come on, Nick. Don't tell me you still believe those fairy tales."  
  
"An associate of Maximino's almost has me convinced. Ever heard the name 'Hector Lemans'?"  
  
"Does he write poetry?" I asked sarcastically.  
  
The lawyer laughed. "No, but his wallet might be thick enough to make up for it in your mind."  
  
I laughed and pushed the door open with one gloved hand. Instantly the sound of saxes and the keyboard hit my earholes. I leaned into the doorway, listening for the bongos of a poetry reading. Either there wasn't one going on or whatever was happening was lousy--Jak, the bongoist, only played when he was really digging something.  
  
Nick came up behind me and leaned in, resting one arm of his elegantly-tailored suit in the doorjam above my head. My mandible and maxilla parted in what would have been a coy smile if I'd had lips and I arched my body closer to the frame of the metal door, taking another drag of the cigarette. "Come on, sugar," he pleaded. "How about a kiss for the road?"  
  
I pushed my fingers lightly against his chest and then turned them over, as if to examine the nails. "Oh, ick. Don't let me down, Nick," I smirked. "You're a lawyer. You're not supposed to have feelings." We both knew the game. Maybe I'd kiss him, maybe I wouldn't. Either way, he'd walk away wanting more. That was the fun of it.  
  
He dropped the arm to my waist, pulling me in to him. "I don't, but I know a good tort when I see one." I exhaled a long, smooth plume of smoke as he slid the other arm around me. The sound of bongos floated onto the balcony and I turned my face toward it briefly before deciding to let Nick win, just this once. Even without lips, his open mouth on mine was hungry when I turned back.  
  
Flash!  
  
We both whirled at the same instant to see two of my least favorite people: Manny Calavera and Rubacava's most ridiculous pet of the bourgeoisie, that idiotic souvenier picture girl. Clad in fishnets, a truly inane mod-style minidress, and a two-foot-tall foam skyscraper hat, she was capable of garnering far more attention than almost anything in the Blue Casket except my poetry readings. Hence the reason I usually preferred that she stay on Calavera's end of town--even Max's clientele was a little too highbrow for her. I was about to open my mouth again to tell her to remove her hideous wardrobe--with her in it--from the premesis when I noticed the camera leveled in her hands. Her subject was clear: she'd just taken a picture of me in a slightly compromising position with my boyfriend's lawyer.  
  
At the corner of my field of vision, I saw Nick's eye sockets widen, then narrow as the tramp sprinted toward the door of the club. "Hey!" he yelled, starting after her, but she was far too quick for him. Rage and fear suffused his skull as he turned back to face me. "If Maximino sees that, we're going to end up in matching terra-cotta pots!"  
  
I shot him a silky smile and waved my cigarette holder in a gesture of dismissal. "Don't be silly," I breathed. "Max wouldn't hurt me. He loves me."  
  
A low growl rose from his throat as he started for the door, fists clenched. I had to laugh again; it'd be interesting to see how he'd manage to scrape himself out of this one. Either way, he was in far hotter water than I--Max had always been a dear about ignoring my little indiscretions, and so I wasn't particularly worried about the latest.  
  
I waited until Nick had slammed my extra-thick industrial steel doors behind him before turning to Calavera. "Manny!" I cried breathily. "At last, we're alone. Tell me, how are the bourgeoisie?"  
  
Manuel Calavera was the owner of a rival club across town for the upscale set--unimaginatively named "the Calavera Cafe" and sporting as its distinctive feature a massive neon cactus. The place had originally been an automat before Calavera had showed up and started working first shift as a mop boy. Within months the owner had been sprouted and the former flunkie was directing the placement of roulette tables. Obviously, no one could ever prove Calavera had anything to do with it, and he probably didn't: he and Max had gotten pretty cozy pretty quickly.  
  
Ahh, Max. Darling Max. Such a pushover. My boyfriend Maximino was the owner of the real hotspot in Rubacava: the Feline Meadows cat track. This endeavor made him the wealthiest, and therefore the most desireable, man in the Eighth Underworld. He had actually funded my own little foray into the night life, paying for the construction and decoration and all the other tedious little details of the Blue Casket not long after I'd first arrived in the city. After that, of course, I'd gotten to know him a little better.  
  
But Max's girth is almost as big as his wallet, and one alliance isn't enough to secure a position of any significant power. My association with Nick could be partially attributed to this, but only partially: the man was shrewd and vicious enough to be a formidable sparring partner, in the bedroom and elsewhere.  
  
He was, of course, no match for me.  
  
I didn't really like Manny Calavera and he knew it, but we generally avoided stepping on each others' toes. I was keenly aware of the fact that if the balance of power in Rubacava shifted from Max to Calavera, my loyalties would have to shift as well. That was the way the game was played in this town.  
  
"Fine," he responded, coming forward from the railing and stopping at my door. He looked uncomfortable. I leaned in against him, exhaling slow streams of smoke. "How's Max?" he asked pointedly.  
  
I snorted. "Oh, Gramps, don't start."  
  
"What are you doing with a snake like Nick?"  
  
I quirked an eyebrow at him. "I'd lay it on ya, Manny, but, ah, I don't think you'd get it."  
  
"Messing around with your boyfriend's lawyer is pretty dangerous," he warned in a tone of voice that sent me waiting with baited breath for him to shake his finger at me as if I were a child instead of a dead poet.  
  
"Oh, maybe I was wrong. You do get it." I gave him my best indulgent smile and started thinking about easing past to work the rest of the club. The hep cats were still waiting for my nightly appearance.  
  
He ignored that one and changed the subject, something that appeared to be a frequent habit of his when dealing with me. "I'm a little worried about Lola..."  
  
It took me a few seconds to place the name Lola. Oh, yes, that picture girl. The one that was in love with Maximino--ahh, blackmail. That would explain why she'd been lurking outside my doorway waiting for me to come out with Nick. What did the silly girl expect to do, go bang on Max's door with pictures in hand and convince him to leave me for her? Somehow I doubted she'd get that far, if Nick Virago was still packing. And Nick Virago was always packing.  
  
Calavera was waiting for an answer, so I gave him one. "That's because she's doomed, Manny. She fell in love with Maximino! That's the one mistake I never made."  
  
"Do you think Nick would hurt her?"  
  
"Only if he finds her, and trust me--he's not good at finding things." I said it with the wink in my voice and had to chuckle to myself when he grimaced even more than a skull usually does and started rummaging around in his jacket pocket. He took his hand out with a pack of cigarettes in it, but he was so offset that he ended up dropping several tiny scrolls of paper.  
  
Normally I wouldn't have bothered to pick them up, but I was curious--perhaps Calavera was an amateur poet--so I bent and plucked them off the ground. They looked like letters, scrawled in a tight, angular hand, and they were signed 'Salvador Limones.'  
  
"What are these? Who is Salvador Limones?" I asked, holding one of them up.  
  
Calavera practically snatched them all back. "Olivia," he chided me in what he apparently thought was a confident-sounding voice, "What kind of revolutionary are you?"  
  
"Who said I was a revolutionary?" I asked. "I'm more interested in Sal Paradise than Sal Limones." A revolutionary? Calavera? I didn't know he had it in him, and that intrigued me. "Still," I amended, "I should study up. It could impress the customers."  
  
"Mmm," he replied noncommittally.  
  
Time to change the subject. "So," I continued smoothly, "tonight makes a year since you first made the scene around here; am I right?" And how many years since I had?  
  
"Yep," he replied. He sounded glum for a moment, then recovered and got a little of the edge back. "Maybe after a year, it's time to expand. You know, I'm thinking of buying this place."  
  
"Really." I laughed and dragged on the cancer stick, flashing him a brilliantly feral smile. "I thought about buying yours for a while. But then I just decided to ask my boyfriend Max to buy it for me."  
  
If he'd had eyes, he would have rolled them. "I'm kidding, Olivia. You can have it. I'm leaving town."  
  
"Manny!" I exclaimed. "You sound so exciting all of a sudden. Why are you leaving town?"  
  
He posed in an apparent attempt to look tough. "Johnny Law, baby. You see, I'm a grifter. I'm bad news."  
  
"Yeah, right. You're running after that ghost chick everyone says you're still so uptight about." I didn't need to ask if I was right; the way he stiffened and furrowed his eye sockets was all the confirmation I needed. "Well, I have a poem I wrote just for you. Pay attention, because it's pretty short. Here it goes: Chu-uh-uh-uhuhuhuuuuumm-P." The "U" sound turned into an orgasmic gasp, the "M" sound a low laugh; I spat the "P" at him through pursed lips, exhaling smoke.  
  
Calavera brightened. "Hey, that reminds me. I wanna read a poem."  
  
He looked like he was trying to toy with me, but this was my turf. I laughed. "Knock yourself out, daddy-o. This place needs a little life."  
  
He strutted over to the stage and gripped the mic in both hands. "I'd like to read a poem," he announced. This was too good to miss; I leaned against the railing of the little balcony and watched as the crowd hissed at the fat cat.  
  
"Wake," he stammered. "Can it be yesterday? Oneness." He was trying to intone the words, but he was nervous and his pitch was actually rising instead of falling. The man was a lost cause. "I am not dead." I groaned. More existentialism. "And tomorrow? ...bones...bones... bones... The end," he announced immediately. My head was almost literally beginning to ache from the sheer pathos of it all. The poem itself might have been passable, but the delivery was ridiculous.  
  
Apparently the beats in the club were of the same opinion as I, because there was a universal hiss and the chastened poet sulked all the way back to my balcony. "Well, I thought it was good," he defended himself before I could get a word in.  
  
"Manny," I laughed throatily, tapping his chest, "let me show you what this crowd is used to." In the next instant, I was swishing my way down the steps and to the stage. Every skull in the club swiveled toward me.  
  
"Good evening, cats and kits," I greeted them all softly. "The poem I'm about to recite is called 'Dying Dawn,' and it's fresh from the oven--it was composed just a few moments ago. I hope you all enjoy it."  
  
I took a long drag on my cigarette and let a slow smile spread across my face, standing silently for a moment as I let the intro sink in. "Wake!" I cried suddenly, and half the club jumped in unison. "Can it be...yesterday? Oneness..." I extended the hand with the cigarette holder and gazed off into the distance--straight at Calavera, whose jaw was dropped impressively far. I let just a hint of breaking creep into my voice as I moaned, "I am not dead. And tomorrow?" Jak's hands landed hard in a roll on the bongos, and I let the sound die away completely before I whispered, "...bones...bones...bones..."  
  
There was another second or two of dead silence before the snaps began. The sound swelled and filled the club in the same way thunderous applause fills an entire theatre. Satisfied, I made my way back to the door to my apartment, where a thunderstruck Calavera was still gaping at me.  
  
"Hey, you stole my poem!" he wailed.  
  
I set one hand on my hip and smiled at him. "Consider it an homage."  
  
His ego fizzled out and died almost visibly, like a balloon when the air is slowly being relased from its latex prison. "Well, catch ya later, hep chick," he eventually tossed over his shoulder as he slunk toward the door. I had a feeling he wouldn't be eager to return any time soon.  
  
"Keep practicing that lingo, Man, you'll get it," I called after him, already glancing at my watch. It was already almost two AM. I didn't have time for these games. The crowd was the same every night; business wouldn't suffer even if open mic night did, but Max's mood might well.  
  
I swished my own way through the club and pushed the door open through the warm night air. It was time to pay a visit to Feline Meadows. 


	5. Rubacava's Lights

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
I don't think I really have anything to say. Olivia's cool. Don't sue me.  
  
_Fleshless Dream_  
  
by flame mage  
  
part II  
  
second stanza: rubacava's lights

* * *

"They say the lights in Rubacava  
  
Will shine as long as felines run.  
  
They say that when those cats stop sprinting,  
  
Rubacava's time is done.  
  
They say the lights in Rubacava  
  
Illuminate all over town  
  
But when a crime's to be committed,  
  
Rubacava's lights go down."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "Rubacava's Lights"

* * *

The feel of a sproutella gun is an acquired taste. I acquired it almost as soon as I stepped out of the DOD building and soon purchased a weapon to match. The grip is slightly different than that of a normal pistol, this one being ergonomically designed for a skeletal clutch. Sproutella recoil, however, is significantly lower than that of a standard LOL handgun, making such a gun blissfully easy to use with deadly accuracy.  
  
The aftermath of a sproutella shooting is the other deadly thing about the weapon. A normal bullet is a less efficient tool when the assailant is shooting to kill; the possibilities of its effects are endless. It can merely injure the target, kill it instantly, or mortally wound it so that it dies slowly over an extended period of time. Sproutella invariably works the last way. One shot spreads. There are no injuries. There is no survival without immediate removal of the affected limb, and no help if the infection spreads to the cranial area.  
  
The process is ironic. Sproutella guns fire not bullets, but compressed capsules of seeds and fertilizer designed to affect bone. On contact, the capsule explodes, accellerating the growth of the seeds sharply. Flowers bloom all over the skeleton, ravaging every bone and socket. Vines enlace the body in an inescapable web. The horror slowly sinks through the entire skeletal structure, until finally the mouth and eyesockets are lacerated with blossoms and screaming is no longer an option. Movement ceases. Struggling and suffering end. Entombed in a verdant floral casket, the victim experiences a death within death.  
  
It's an interesting process to watch.  
  
Imagining this scenario as applied to the photo girl interested me briefly as I slipped out of the club and walked quickly through the crossroads to the back entrance of the cat track. The cats were obviously running; the roaring of the crowds filtered dully through the massive facade of Feline Meadows. The races had never particularly interested me, although an animal called Sanspoof was amusing for a short time when it was winning. I'd viewed the cat with an eye somewhere between that of a connoisseur and a kindred spirit. Several times in its earliest races I'd seen it kick other animals in the face while running, yet the populace never seemed to notice and would, in fact, have been irate had such a thing been suggested. I admired in it the same quality I possessed; the ability to step cleanly over the competition and come out on top.  
  
In the end, though, Sanspoof's end had come indirectly at my gloved hands; when Max built me my first airship, the Olivia I, it had collapsed onto the track during the race. This unfortunate event caused a massive explosion and killed the leading cat. Max was beside himself. For my part, I was annoyed about the loss of my airship, but far more pleased with my avoidance of the question of marriage Max had been about to ask. I'd always had a penchant for keeping my options open.  
  
The back staircase was deserted, and I strode briskly toward the shaft of light. As my hand hit the railing over the first step another hand fell on my wrist. I turned sharply to see Nick Virago standing behind me, a grim expression on his skull.  
  
"You do seem to turn up in the strangest places," I commented with a wry smile.  
  
He shifted his briefcase under his arm. "I have some paperwork to deliver to Maximino. Are you going up?"  
  
"Of course," I replied. "Can't expect Max to go all evening without enjoying the presence of his eternally erudite girlfriend, can we?"  
  
Nick made that brief growling sound in the back of his throat again. "Of course not. Well, then, I'll have to wait in the lounge until you're done."  
  
"I'm not sure you'll want to go in there if his office is going to look anything like my room by the time I leave, darling."  
  
"Perhaps one of the waiters can find a tablecloth to spread across the mess on the desk while Maximino signs these," he answered dryly. I replaced my hand on the banister and started to ascend when he grabbed my wrist. "It's done," he told me in an urgent whisper. I knew as well as he did what those words meant. It meant that tomorrow morning someone in the city would find the body of a badly-dressed photographer buried under a hailstorm of flowers.  
  
"Did you get the pictures?" I hissed back.  
  
"No, but I assure you they'll be in my hands by dawn," he growled. "The girl didn't have them on her. It's possible she has them squirreled away somewhere, but she can't tell anyone where. I dumped her at the top of the lighthouse." His hand slipped into his pocket and rattled his cigarette case briefly. There was a clinking sound from inside that I assumed came from the lighthouse key.  
  
"Get them. Now, if you'll excuse me, I do have business to attend to." I brushed past him and continued up the stairs, turning this new development over in my mind.

* * *

"Hello, Max," I said in my smokiest voice, oozing through the doorway. I made a habit of oozing around men, particularly Max, because it got results. The empty sockets in his skull were trained on me as I crossed the room.  
  
Max's club was the antithesis of my own, and the differences between his office and mine underscored this. Where the Blue Casket was dark and intimate, Feline Meadows was infested with bourgeois opulence in the form of incandescent lighting and plush red velvet. I tried to achieve elegance in blacklit neon simplicity. Max's clients didn't want simplicity; they wanted to feel like big shots, with all the excessive luxury that implies. And because Max was the biggest big shot of them all, his office was wide, crammed with gleaming trophies and marble flooring and hideous Oriental rugs, and lined with a full glass wall overlooking the track. Some opposites combine to complement each other; Max and I, despite what he thought, were not one of them. I hated the place.  
  
"Olivia," he greeted me, spinning around in his chair and tapping ash off his cigar. "You look beautiful."  
  
"I look the same as I always look, Max." I deflected the compliment lazily, removing a cigarette from the pack in my trench pocket. He stood to ignite it for me with a gold lighter and then leaned in to clamp his skeletally meaty arms around my waist.  
  
I was still exhausted from the events of the previous hour and would have liked nothing better than to insert that cigarette forcibly several inches down my beloved's trachea, but that isn't how the game is played in Rubacava. Instead, I blew out a thin stream of cigarette smoke before idly brushing a piece of lint off the sleeve of his magenta suit coat (nauseating when combined with a banana-yellow shirt, a flecked green tie, and Max's less-than-sylphlike build), and resigning myself to the inevitable liplock. Sometimes the ends justify the means, and this was one of those times.  
  
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the Eighth Underworld is its inherent paradoxes. For example, how is it possible to lack lips, a tongue, and salivary glands and still manage to slobber all over someone during an extended kiss? My mind was still running along this vein when I finally managed to extricate myself some time later and perch on the edge of his desk to look out at the track as if it fascinated me. He settled back down in his chair like an overgrown bird nesting and watched me; unlike I, he wasn't feigning captivation. "You always look beautiful, Olivia," he offered.  
  
After all this time, men still seemed to believe that all their pretty words actually had an effect on me. "How's business tonight?" I asked, lifting the smoldering cigarette to my lips.  
  
"Great; it's always great. The lounge is quiet, but they're jammed down at the track. The Day of the Dead is always good for us around here."  
  
"Has anyone dropped by?" I was still gazing out at the track, but my earholes were trained on every word he was saying. Nick would have known instantly that he was being grilled, but darling Max didn't have a clue. I wanted to know if Calavera had already been there, and if so, how much damage control I would have to do. In my mind I was seeing the embrace, not the furball-strewn dirt below, trying to remember where my hands had been. Could I make Nick take the fall for it, say he forced himself on me? Maybe he was threatening to sell Max's business information to Calavera and the only way I could prevent it was to sleep with him...  
  
"No. Like I said, it's been quiet," Maximino replied. I heaved an internal smile of relief and expelled smoke all the way up to the mirrorred ceiling. That was that much less work I'd have to do at the moment. "I did get a phone call, though," he added, and if I'd had muscles they would have frozen again.  
  
"From whom?" I asked casually.  
  
"Remember when I told you about my business contacts in El Marrow?"  
  
I remembered, all right. He hadn't shut up about it for weeks. "I believe you mentioned them," was what I actually said.  
  
"I'm gonna have a little party at the club next month so we can meet face-to-face. We've been talking about opening some casinos in El Marrow, and I want Mr. Lemans to see the best of what Rubacava has to offer. I'd like you to be there too."  
  
Lemans. That was the name Nick had mentioned. Deep pockets. If I'd heard it from anyone else, I would have been skeptical, but Nick Virago had enough cash running through his bony hands to know what real money was. And he'd made it sound like this Lemans cat was dealing in Double-N tickets or something. Perhaps, I thought with a feral smile, this was my next victim.  
  
"Well, I certainly fall under the category of 'the best of what Rubacava has to offer,' don't I?" I purred. "All right, darling. I'll be happy to put in an appearance at this little shindig of yours."  
  
"That's great." He was beaming and chewing on his cigar simultaneously, sending flickers of saliva across the desk with every syllable. "I really think--yeah, who is it?"  
  
I turned toward the office door just as it swung open and Nick Virago stepped into the room. "I'm sorry to interrupt, Max," he drawled, "but I have some paperwork that has to go out tomorrow morning and it needs your signature. I'd like to go over it with you."  
  
"Business before pleasure, eh?" Max scowled, but he waved the attorney over. "All right, Nick, let me see it. I'm sorry, honey. This shouldn't take long."  
  
Nick was turned toward Max, but when the kingpin looked away his lawyer's eye sockets were on me. Something was up. I wasn't sure what the game was, but it was probably time to make my exit.  
  
"That's all right, darling. I really should be getting back in any event. Open mic night is going tragically slowly, and I'm afraid I'll lose my clientele if I don't get things rolling. You know how that goes."  
  
"Sure. You wanna drop by a little later, we can--"  
  
Nick cleared his throat rather louder than necessary. "Good night, Olivia."  
  
He'd said earlier that he'd wait until I was done. Under normal circumstances, I might have thought he was a jealous lover trying to prevent the inevitable clinch, but he wasn't the type. If he was kicking me out early, he must have a good reason, so I took my cue and left the room. As soon as the door shut behind me, I discovered the reason for Nick's urgent need to talk to Max--Manny Calavera was sitting in Nick's customary chair in the High Roller's lounge outside the office, and he was nonchalantly playing with Nick's custom-made titanium cigarette case.  
  
"Hey, it's Olivia," he greeted me coolly. "Which one of your boyfriends did you come to see?"  
  
"Cute, Man. How long does it take you to come up with these lines? For that matter, what are you still doing here? Last I heard, Johnny Law was breathing down your neck."  
  
"Yeah, well, turns out it's actually a friend of mine who's on his bad side. I need Golden Boy here to spring him for me."  
  
I laughed. "'Golden Boy' doesn't spring for just anyone, daddy. He's Max's personal laywer."  
  
"Yeah, he told me that too. Turns out he was pretty willing to negotiate when I showed him this." If I'd blinked, I would have missed it, but luckily I no longer had eyelids. For an instant, Calavera whipped a piece of paper out of his jacket and flashed it at me. It was the picture from the club.  
  
I started calculating. Was Calavera packing heat too? Somehow I doubted it; he didn't seem like the type. The lounge was deserted, except for the lone waiter wandering in and out of the kitchen with his nose in the air. If I could get my gun out quickly enough, I could jam it against that cylindrical skull of his and force him to give me the picture--but then, I had no way of knowing how many copies he might have. Shooting him really wasn't an option. Max's opinion might count for a lot in this town, but I had a feeling that not even he could keep Bogen's paws off me if I got pegged with murder two. In any event, I knew I could worm my way out of this one. If Nick was stupid enough to take the fall for it, that was his problem.  
  
"Touche, Manny," I conceded, snapping my fingers. "You're sharper than I give you credit for."  
  
He eyeballed me, sans the eyeballs. "You're the expert."  
  
I shot him a glance and ran my fingertips along his skull. "As fun as it's been, I've got business to take care of. Keep working on those poems of yours and drop by again, if you have the time. I'm always looking for amateur talent." One last smile and I was striding toward the elevator, leaving him there to grope for a comeback. After all, I had a club to run. 


	6. Fat Cat Limerick

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
Again, if you don't recognize a poem from the game, I wrote it. But they're fan poems anyway, so I suppose I can't really claim to own them...  
  
_Fleshless Dream_  
  
by flame mage  
  
part II  
  
third stanza: fat cat limerick

* * *

"They raided old Manny's cafe  
  
And Manny was too scared to stay.  
  
So the coward skipped town  
  
And they closed his club down  
  
What happened next, no one can say."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "Fat Cat Limerick"

* * *

I locked the Casket down at dawn, when there were only a few die-hards left still working up the nerve to read their "Howl" pastiches. Rubacava only turns on after dark. In the early mornings, the fog comes up thick from the sea and doesn't burn off until midday. No one cares, because everyone's sleeping anyway except the few souls who are just passing through. El Marrow isn't a port city, so the ships that take better souls than mine to the end of the line dock at Rubacava. It's possible to charter a slower vessel if you've got the cash, but very few people do by the time they get here; they've been conned by the DOD vultures into blowing their life's savings on walking sticks. Most souls end up at the cat track or the Calavera Cafe, throwing what little they have left into the kitties or the roulette tables in a last-ditch attempt to scrimp up the cash to get out. Most of them never will.  
  
Nothing's open during the day except the few hotels that cater to pass-throughs. The locals are all nocturnal, so I stripped back down and went to bed as soon as I'd locked the doors. When I awoke again around eight o'clock that evening, I showered quickly (habit), slipped into a fresh turtleneck and trench, and went outside to check the day's headlines. I scanned through the entire paper; no new reports of sproutings in the obituaries except Anselmo Naranja, whose body had just been identified the night before by Membrillo, et cetera, et cetera...I finally found it on the very back page, just a three-line blurb about an unidentified body found on top of the lighthouse. Rubacava police were seeking club owner Manuel Calavera for questioning, as he'd been seen in the area. I smiled. So Calavera was going to take the fall for this one.  
  
Unfortunately, my luck didn't extend that far. Not long after that, the entourage started appearing and setting up for the evening. I kept hearing whispered snatches of it as they wove their ways around the club, and finally I cornered Jak as he was setting up his bongos and asked him what the buzz was about.  
  
"Mr. High Roller skipped town, that's what the buzz is about," he told me. "Bogen raided his club."  
  
"Max?!" I demanded, practically collaring him. This was bad; there went my bankroll. I'd have to get the next car into El Marrow before the shit hit the fan and try to find a new benefactor--  
  
"Nah, Calavera. Fixed roulette tables, I hear. He and that demon he came in with just got on a ship and bailed, set sail just before dawn. Word got out too late to make the papers. His coat girl's in hock, but she's been telling everyone he got a lead on that chick Colomar he's been chasing after for a year and split after her."  
  
I cursed under my breath. Too damn bad, Ofrenda. Chalk one up for the bourgeoisie. "What's the story on the Cafe?" I asked out loud.  
  
Jak shrugged. "I'm bone dry there, sister."  
  
I couldn't get anything else out of him; I'd have to wait around to get the scoop from Nick. It looked like the photo girl's body hadn't been identified yet, but I wasn't particularly interested in her one way or the other--she'd been collateral damage. The only thing I really cared about was exactly what had happened to that photograph of hers.  
  
I'd have to be around when the doors opened at nine; I didn't have time to get to Feline Meadows and back in the forty-five minutes I had. The only thing I could really do was light myself a cigarette and start planning out my night. I'd have to be around early in the evening, but I'd be wandering in and out of my apartment, and I wouldn't dream of getting near the stage before midnight. Talking to Max would have to wait until things had cooled down a little.  
  
I went upstairs and out to one of the ramped balconies at the front of the club. Rubacava isn't a high-rise city in the same way as El Marrow; at three stories up, I was at an elevation higher than that of most of the city--with the exception of the former Calavera Cafe, which was linked to the rest of Rubacava by the elevator on the other side of the Blue Casket. From where I was standing, I had a fairly good view of the entire town. Feline Meadows was already busy, and the sounds of the race that was in progress drifted toward me.  
  
The sun was glowing a brilliant carmine in a scarlet sky now. As soon as it set, the lights of the Casket would come on and the real day in Rubacava would begin. During the day, the Blue Casket looks like a dead husk--the exterior of the building is primarily constructed from brick and stained glass in shades of lime and aquamarine, but the glass isn't lit from the inside until I open at dusk. Only the gold accents of the facade pick up the sunlight and reflect it back at this time of day, serving as a signal that it's almost time.  
  
If the exterior of the club is alternately dead and vibrantly alive, the interior is constantly in a state of existence somewhere in between--I designed it to suggest my own stance in that living-yet-not-alive realm. It's a vision in indigo and neon, lined by brick and bookshelves, with a high ceiling made intimate by cast-iron arches that slope overhead. There are only a few tables, and the real focal point of the main room is a small semicircular stage. Tonight, that stage was scheduled to be occupied by Slisko, one of my regulars. Apparently he'd saved open mic night the previous evening.  
  
Suddenly everything around me exploded into a sea of blue and green. The sun was setting, and the lights had just come on. For a moment, I felt as I always felt at that point in the evening--as if I'd been plunged underwater.  
  
I smiled. Good morning, Rubacava.

* * *

The Casket always fills later than the other clubs in town; that night we hit capacity just before midnight, when I was scheduled to take over for a few minutes and read some of my own later works. As usual, I made my way toward the stage fasionably late, and Slisko ran long. He was still finishing the last set when I got there and leaned back against a table to watch for my opening.  
  
"And the cats cryin' in the street are still starvin'," he recited passionately, "'Cause the Man's got them collared and he won't let them go. / Don't ya know / We're all just the tools of the Man / So brothers, if you pray you'd better / That those two street cats got a plan."  
  
"Street cats?" I hissed to Jak, who was banging violently away at the bongos. From the little I'd heard, he'd had something of a criminal record in a previous life; it had a tendency to manifest itself in the form of aggression about halfway through the night when he started getting into the swing of things.  
  
"Calavera and Salvador Limones," he whispered back. "I heard him talking to the other two earlier. Sounds like they're revolutionaries or something. I think Slisko thinks that Calavera took off to meet up with this cat Limones and change the world."  
  
I snorted again at the idea. It had been ridiculous the night before, but I couldn't believe this crowd was taking it seriously. Manny Calavera, a revolutionary? I'd had him pegged as more the type of person Slisko's revolution was against. The man might not have controlled the means of production in any real sense, but he was definitely the kind of guy who'd be seen as oppressing the masses. He must have done something to get on their good side between his performance the previous evening and now.  
  
And there was that Limones cat again...  
  
I was shaken out of my reverie by the sound of scattered fingersnaps, radiating primarily from the direction of Alexi and Gunnar, the poet's two Communist compatriots. Slisko slunk off the front of the stage and back to his usual seat, where he immediately downed the house special, a Coffin Shooter on the rocks. The man was my meat.  
  
I started off with some of my older work, then broke into a few newer things to keep the regulars on their toes. I was in full swing when the thick double doors outswung me and Nick Virago stepped in and crossed to the back of the balcony by the exit. Quickly, I switched to "Grim Fandango" for the big finale and exited the stage to snaps of approval. Nick followed.  
  
"I want to know everything that's happened in this city in the last twenty-four hours," I demanded as soon as the door to my suite shut behind us.  
  
Coolly, he pulled the chair out from my desk and sat; I perched on the edge of the bed and leaned forward, all business. "You've heard about Calavera?" he asked.  
  
"But of course, Nick. What do you take me for?"  
  
"Sharp enough to have picked that up. The girl's body has been found and taken to the morgue, but Membrillo's an idiot; she'll never be identified."  
  
"I don't care about the girl," I snapped impatiently. "Did Calavera get the pictures to Max?"  
  
"No." He withdrew a manilla envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and set it on my desk. "I have them all: negatives and prints."  
  
"Give me those." I held out my hand and he set the envelope in it. With one fingertip, I slit it open and shook out the contents. "We make such an adorable couple," I snorted sarcastically. "I almost hate to do this." With that, I extended my cigarette holder until the ember was nestled directly against the paper. Within minutes, the entire stack had been incinerated. "Interesting," I commented. "Perhaps I'll use these as props the next time I perform 'Ashes.' Did I miss anything else?"  
  
"That cat with the grotesque eye infection lost, leaving me a few hundred dollars richer."  
  
"Anything I care about, Nick. That's pocket change."  
  
"I had to get one of those moronic dock workers out of the Rubacava jail to get those ashes back. There was a strike on the docks last night."  
  
"Stop right there. What does getting a SeaBee out of the can have to do with the pictures?" I paused, and then it hit me. "Calavera."  
  
"Exactly. He swiped my cigarette case and got the key. He must have found the photo girl and gotten the pictures from her. I talked to him last night; he knew exactly what was going on."  
  
"Sounds like he knew a lot more than that." Briefly, I sketched out what I'd heard from Jak about Calavera's connections to Salvador Limones. "The man is some kind of revolutionary."  
  
"Interesting, but it doesn't have any real effect on us. Calavera took the Limbo out of town last night. I checked with Velasco, and that ship is on a yearlong voyage to Puerto Zapato. It'll be a long time before he comes back to haunt us."  
  
As a matter of fact, it would be exactly two years to the day. 


	7. December Vision

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
This poem isn't from the game, but I don't own it. Not sure why? Well, if Poe's still in the Eighth Underworld, he might come to haunt Olivia for copyright infringement...  
  
_Fleshless Dream  
_  
by flame mage  
  
part II  
  
fourth stanza: december vision

* * *

"I'm going to tell you about the night I met him.  
  
Distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December  
  
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor--  
  
--oh, stop it, my version's better anyway."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "December Vision"

* * *

After a while in the Land of the Dead, existentialism seems relatively futile, but living poets throughout the ages have spent an inordinate amount of time wondering what happens to the soul after death. When I was one of them, I would have scoffed and said "nothing," but in my current state it all made a twisted kind of sense: I'd simply awoken inside a paper shell as it was deftly sliced open by the classical personification of Death. But of course. How simple.  
  
I have to admit that one of the hardest parts to get used to was being reduced to a skeleton. For almost my entire lifetime, I'd been used to the best of everything money could buy--other people's money, of course. Then one day, with no warning, I found myself sitting inside the reaper's office--sans jewels, sans clothes, sans even skin.  
  
Two things could account for my good fortune in arriving in Rubacava in record time: first, the reaper was a man, and second, I knew how to handle men. My lack of tear ducts prevented me from crying, but it made no tangible difference; I was a professional. The reaper tossed his hood back, looked at me, and said something I'll never forget: "You don't fool me, Ms. Ofrenda. I've been jerking people around long enough to know when someone else does it. But from one grifter to another, if you want my help, you got it." And with that--and a little delay--Domino Hurley escorted me downstairs to the DOD garage, where his driver chauffered me all 1020 kilometers to Rubacava.  
  
But all these details are irrelevant. In the years between that day and the night I met Hector Lemans for the first time, I'd mastered the art of fleshless dressing, so that I could have almost passed for a living woman. That night, I slipped into a long-sleeved evening gown, furs, and my customary beret, and set out toward the High Roller's Lounge of Feline Meadows.  
  
I mention this because Hector told me later that the reason I'd caught his eye the second I entered the room was that dress. I'd chosen a shade of ebony that would contrast with the plush red lounge without clashing, and as soon as I stepped through the door, the chatter stopped and everyone noticed.  
  
"Olivia," Max cooed, brushing through the crowd--not a particularly easy feat for someone his size. "You look beautiful, honey." He'd said those same words to me exactly sixty-eight times in the month since the Day of the Dead alone. After clamping me in a bear hug and making what appeared to be a sincere effort to salivate on every square inch of my skull, he dragged me up the stairs to the lounge balcony. "And now, it's time to introduce my two guests of honor. Hector, I'd like you to meet the love of my life--not to mention Rubacava's poet laureate--Olivia Ofrenda. Olivia, this is my business associate and close personal friend, Hector Lemans."  
  
I hadn't been the poet laureate of Rubacava until that very moment, incidentally; Rubacava didn't even have one. But what Max said went in that town, and it made a marked impression on the man sitting across the table from me.  
  
If Max was large, Hector Lemans was positively corpulent. One of the plush sofas had been dragged upstairs for him, and he was sprawled across it in a range of several square feet. Certainly his dress sense was no better than Max's, but what struck me most about his appearance other than its sheer size was the bizarre greenish cast to his bones--not to mention the red fez cocked in what I assumed was intended to be a jaunty manner on top of his overwhelmingly peanut- shaped skull. But he had about him the air of complete self-assurance that only exists in a very wealthy and powerful man. Instantly, I turned up the charm and pounced. Let an opportunity like this get away? Not a chance.  
  
"Mr. Lemans," I greeted him, extending my hand to him and giving him my well-known firm shake before he bent to kiss it. "It's quite an honor. I've been hearing about you for months."  
  
"All good things, I hope," he chortled to himself. For a moment, no one else laughed, then several men behind him in expensive suits began to chuckle to themselves too. So the man even had henchmen who traveled with him to laugh at his jokes. They'd be paid, of course. That told me that Lemans had both enough money to throw around and a need to feel good about himself. I was an expert at taking care of both. "Please, do call me Hector. I feel as if I already know you. As it happens, Max has told me quite a bit about his lady friend as well," he continued. "I understand you also own a club here in Rubacava."  
  
"Ah, my reputation precedes me." I laughed as well, but mentally I was still sizing him up. Most men's eyes still drifted down to the area of my ribcage through force of habit. His didn't. He'd been dead long enough to know it was a waste of his energy. No greenhorn, then. "I own a little place near the center of town, the Blue Casket. It's really just a cafe and a place where local poets can exhibit their work, but it suits me."  
  
"Come now, I'm sure you're just being modest. I'd expect nothing less than the best from Rubacava's poet laureate, especially now that I've seen her."  
  
Max had been growing increasingly uncomfortable throughout this entire exchange, and now his patience finally snapped. "Raoul!" he called loudly. "I think we're about ready for dinner to start here!"  
  
"My name is Ramon, sir," the waiter explained patiently as he materialized at his boss' side. "Raoul left your service last month."  
  
"Whatever," Max snapped, puffing on his cigar. "Now that Hector and Olivia are both here, it's time to show them the best cuisine this town has to offer. And the speed at which it can be delivered to our table." This last was accented heavily, with a clear intimation: move it.  
  
There was a tense silence until the food arrived a few minutes later, at which point we were all temporarily occupied with its consumption. The little conversation that occurred during the next hour served to tell me only that Maximino's guest was indeed a very high-rent businessman in El Marrow, and that he was unmarried. By that point, I doubt it would have mattered much if he had been.  
  
Eventually Max pushed back his last plate of sauteed scallops and leaned back in his chair. "Normally you know I don't like mixing business and pleasure, Hector--except when it comes to my kitties, that is." Max had his own squad of cheerleaders: the beautiful people of Rubacava, who tittered obligingly from the first floor. "But I'd like Olivia to hear this, and she's so busy with the club that she doesn't have much chance to get out to El Marrow."  
  
"Not at all, my good man," Lemans said, and I smiled in pleasure at the upper-crust British accent. This was all so beautiful it almost ached. "Where's that lawyer of yours?"  
  
"At your service, as always, Mr. Lemans," Nick said, stepping forward. Like all good hired help, he had the ability to appear virtually out of nowhere. "And as always, it is a pleasure."  
  
"Have a seat, Nick." Maximino snapped his fingers and one of his lackeys rushed up and pulled out one of the wire chairs for the lawyer. "Hector's just about to tell us about his proposal."  
  
"It's fairly small at the moment, gentlemen...Olivia." Lemans looked at me slightly longer than Max would have liked. "As you know, I am a denizen of El Marrow, a city that lacks the vigorous nightlife possessed by Rubacava. My business, however, prevents me from leaving my residence with any frequency, although I do so enjoy this city's atmosphere, and so I'd like to change that. I'd like to establish a casino or two in El Marrow, and everyone in the Land of the Dead knows that Maximino is the kingpin of casinos."  
  
Max swelled with pride in a way that put me in mind of nothing so much as a pufferfish. "You're right there, Hector. Where are you thinking about setting 'em up?"  
  
"As you understand, Max, I'm interested in protecting my investment, so my initial endeavor would be only a single casino. As for that one location...a few years ago, I established a few connections at the Department of Death. One of their senior executives is interested in updating the Department's image, and, after discussion, he informed me that he wouldn't be averse to the creation of a casino in the lobby of their building."  
  
"If you don't mind my asking, who is this 'associate' of yours?" I interjected.  
  
"Sharp, isn't she?" Lemans laughed, turning to Max, whose skull would have turned red if if could have as he nodded. "A man by the name of Domino Hurley."  
  
My reaper. The only kind of associate he'd been when I'd known him several years earlier was 'junior sales.' Now he was in a position of enough authority to commission casinos. Interesting.  
  
There was something else that bothered me about the whole situation, though. Nick had mentioned Hector Lemans as being a dealer in destiny--"Suffice it to say that moving onto my eternal reward might be a little easier than I'd been led to believe" had been his exact words. I wasn't entirely sure what that meant. Was the man dealing in Double-N tickets or something? If that was the case, he had something larger than casinos on his mind. Tickets on the Number Nine could mean a fortune to any poor saps who believed the Ninth Underworld existed and wanted a one- way ticket there. The casinos could be a front, or a way to pool wealthy clients to whom the offer could be made.  
  
If there was such an endeavor going on here, I was sure Max knew nothing about it. If I were running this show, he'd be the flunky, to run around doing my bidding as regarded the surface operation until he was no longer needed, at which point I'd get rid of him. I already knew Nick was in on it, because he'd been the one who mentioned it to me. But I wasn't sure how Domino Hurley fit into the equation. It was probable that he was the sales arm of the deal, but how were the tickets being obtained? Could they be counterfeited a la Chowchilla Charlie? There was still too much I didn't know about this situation for me to be able to get a read on it.  
  
"...DOD building?" Max was asking.  
  
"The legal ramifications?" Nick leaned back in his chair. "I'd have to do a bit of research. As long as you've obtained written permission from a Department of Death authority, it should be fine. I can draw up the necessary documents myself."  
  
"Excellent. What I really want from you, Max, is a little advice on how to get the place running. I'm looking to draw a very exclusive clientele, something like what you entertain in this lounge of yours."  
  
"I can tell you how to do that," Max said with pride. And for the next forty-five minutes, he did, ad nauseum.  
  
When he'd enlightened us all on the enthralling topic of how, exactly, one obtains the kind of patrons I go out of my way to avoid, until I reached the point of an almost physical sense of illness, Lemans cleared his throat. "Thank you. Of course, I'd like you to be involved every step of the way. We are partners, after all." They shook hands in a manly way, and then Lemans turned to me. "But I'm interested to hear your perspective on all of this...if I may, Olivia?" I nodded, and he continued. "Olivia, then. You own a club as well. Do you have any words of wisdom for me?"  
  
Nick was withdrawing his new cigarette case from his jacket pocket; I motioned for him to hand me one and Hector rushed to give me a light as soon as I had it in my holder. I inhaled thoughtfully and looked at him. "If you know the Blue Casket, Hector, you know that your customers and mine are very different. Still, running a club and a casino probably aren't all that different. Your first issue is still money, and..." A small smile flickered across my face. "...you look like it isn't an issue."  
  
"It isn't," he replied, with just a hint of a boast in the way he sucked down the last of his champagne.  
  
"In that case, I worry about atmosphere, entertainment, and food, in that order. My club has been successful because of my relationship with my regulars, but in a place like the DOD complex, you'll have more of a...transient client base, if I'm not mistaken?" He nodded again. "Then my priorities don't change. Souls coming into El Marrow are disoriented and terrified. Provide an atmosphere where they can forget about reality. Think glitz and energy and excitement. Do that, and you'll have all the customers you need."  
  
"Thank you, Olivia. Thank you very much indeed." With an effort, Lemans heaved himself to his feet. "And with that, I am afraid I must be going. I have rather a long trip ahead of me back to El Marrow. Max, my thanks to you as well, and to your excellent lawyer," who'd said a total of six sentences during the entire conversation, "and...Olivia, would it be possible to pay a visit to your establishment during the coming weeks? I'd dearly love to see your theory in practice."  
  
"My doors will be open," I responded, reaching my hand out again so he could kiss it again. As a matter of fact, one of my doors was always open at this time of year to keep the club slightly chilly and provide the ambience my customers expected, but I'd probably have to break policy and open the other door if I expected him to fit through.  
  
"Then I bid you all adieu." The three lackeys closed in and escorted Lemans downstairs and to the elevator. By this time, the party was breaking up.  
  
"Well," Nick muttered as close to my earhole as he dared when Max wasn't looking. "He certainly seemed quite taken with you."  
  
"A little too taken," Max scowled, storming downstairs.  
  
I leaned against the balcony railing and smiled to myself. Taken enough for me to move up in the world? I'd just have to wait and see. 


	8. First Bloom of Love

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
Olivia Ofrenda. Nick Virago. Hector Lemans. Ahh, you have to love the bad guys.  
  
_Fleshless Dream_  
  
by flame mage  
  
part II  
  
fifth stanza: first bloom of love

* * *

"That face,  
  
vaguely verdant, my dream-haunter...  
  
Something striking. I see you coming...  
  
...are you, too, seeking someone...?  
  
Love...?"  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "First Bloom of Love"

* * *

Hector Lemans was a man who was true to his word. He arrived in the Blue Casket exactly two weeks later, around ten o'clock at night. As luck would have it, Naomi, the poet who was reading that night, had just begun a set break, and so I was able to make my way onstage as soon as he stepped in the door.  
  
I'd been planning for this moment ever since Max's party earlier that month. The club was a little smokier than normal, a little warmer, a little more welcoming to outsiders. This helped to account for the few newcomers we drew that night off the street--curious thrill-seekers, lulled and lured in by the open door and the sweet sounds of jazz filtering out into the heart of the city. I'd planned this, thinking Lemans would feel more comfortable if he wasn't the only stranger in the room. And I'd been writing.  
  
"That face," I sighed softly when the room was dead silent and I could clearly see him standing awkwardly on the entance balcony. "Vaguely verdant, my dream-haunter..." Now I was in my element. I knew how to pull the dreamy, lovesick act. "Something striking. I see you coming...are you, too, seeking someone...? Love...?"  
  
It was a sniveling parody of my early work, but most of the occupants of the club were fans of mine, and if I'd performed a reading of the back of a cereal box they would have thought it was the height of genius. The outsiders were unaware of what I was trying to do, but Lemans looked entranced as we gravitated toward each other at the center of the room.  
  
"Olivia," he greeted me, kissing my hand once again. "I must say, I'm charmed. This certainly is quite different from Feline Meadows."  
  
"Thus its appeal," I smiled silkily. "But you don't seem like the type for this atmosphere."  
  
"Not usually, no. Something about it, however--" here he smiled "--shall we say, strikes me. Would you be so kind as to tell me a bit about it? Judging by the construction, it appears to be relatively old."  
  
"And Max spent a lot of money to make it look that way. The building was actually contructed about six years ago."  
  
He reached out to touch one of the leather-bound volumes lining the wall with his fingertips and drew back when he saw the dust. "Maximino put up the money?"  
  
"Yes. Aside from the on-site suites of business owners such as myself, the only housing in Rubacava is in the form of hotels. Max owns several of these. The longer people are entertained here, the longer they stay in town, and the longer they stay in town, the more money he makes. It's to his distinct advantages to take smaller establishments like the Casket under his wing."  
  
"It's not due to your...erm...relationship?" he asked delicately.  
  
I smiled. "That too. In any event, my market is the beat scene, and it's more lucrative than one would expect. As you can see, I get a little spillover from the more high-end clubs in town, and most of my customers are diehard regulars."  
  
"Can you tell me a little about how you apply your theory here?" he asked.  
  
"Of course. The atmosphere is..."  
  
"A little dark."  
  
"Dark and cold, like the hearts of men." He looked almost hurt; I laughed. "It's an old line of mine, Hector. I designed the Casket that way intentionally. In a sense, it's a metaphor, but more practically, the dark focuses the eye on the stage. Which, incidentally, houses the entertainment. As for food, I keep it fairly light--we focus instead on specialty coffee and drinks like the Coffin Shooter."  
  
He looked impressed. "My word, Olivia, you certainly seem to know what you're doing here."  
  
"Thus _my_ appeal," I laughed. "But thank you, Hector, I do appreciate it. All..." I let my face angle slightly up toward his and then turned away quickly, as if I'd grown dreamy for a moment and then snapped myself out of it. "All my best wishes for the club," I finished, leaning on the railing of the balcony.  
  
I felt his fingers on my arm and turned back a little to see him watching me. He said, "Please, wait a moment. I...would you care to accompany me to the High Roller's Lounge and have a drink?"  
  
My mind flickered back involuntarily to the little pile of ashes in my desk drawer. I'd been so careful with the evidence of my little indiscretion for a reason: my boyfriend was a very jealous man. He already thought Hector had too much interest in me. Any hint that something was going on could send him flying into a rage and break the whole deal, and I'd be left without either of them. "I'm afraid I can't on such short notice," I said in a voice that sounded laden with regrets. "This place requires a little attention. Next time you're in town, though...?"  
  
"I'd be absolutely delighted," he answered swiftly.

* * *

I was used to spending long stretches of the night in my office, grappling with paperwork, poetry, or Nick Virago, but with the open invitation on the table I began to mingle with the crowd a little more. As a result, I heard even more of the word on the street than I'd already known. The night after Hector visited the club, I overheard Slisko's crowd mention Calavera and started listening. I found out that my prediction and Jak's report had been accurate: he'd blown town the very night he saw that woman he'd been pining for hit the docks with another man. I had to laugh. How like a man, to rush off and do something pseudo-heroic without thinking, especially for something as petty as a response to the release of chemicals in the brain.  
  
Gradually I began to hear more and more about his connections to the revolution of theirs. Apparently he was moonlighting as an agent with something called the Lost Souls Alliance, some underground rebel group in El Marrow devoted to taking down the DOD.  
  
I had no particular fondness or dislike for the DOD as an institution; what caught my attention was the awe with which they regarded the LSA's leader, the aforementioned Salvador Limones. The DOD held a lot of power in the Land of the Dead. If this setup of his played out, this cat Limones might end up on top--certainly he'd end up knocking Hector's pedestal over. He was someone to watch.  
  
At the moment, though, I had my hands full with Hector himself. The drive between Rubacava and El Marrow is still a long one, but his trips became increasingly frequent and increasingly lengthy. He began to drop by the club every night for the entire duration of his weeklong stays in town, and I was always more than happy to provide him with any business advice I could during the two hours or more he stayed.  
  
I had a goal in mind, however. To know whether he was my logical step up, I had to know more about this underground gig selling shots at afterlife plus. Unfortunately, he was unusually closed-lipped about the thing, and no matter how hard I worked to smoke the details out without letting him know what I was trying to do, I couldn't get anything out of him, night after night after night.  
  
One of those nights, though, I finally cracked him. I'd ordered him a Coffin Shooter with less than the usual amount of sedative--just enough to make him drowsy. We took a table in the corner of the club and chatted for more than an hour. Finally, after his third round--he was a large man--I asked nonchalantly about his business enterprises and he said, "Well, I suppose I do trust you enough to let you in on my little secret, Olivia. Is there any place where we could talk in private?"  
  
I stood, helped the sloshed suit to his feet, and led him back through the club into the room that doubled as my bedroom and my office.  
  
"Now then," he began when he'd been made comfortable on my bed--the only surface in the room large enough to accomodate him--with a fourth Coffin Shooter, "the information I'm about to give you is a very sensitive, and very lucrative, prospect. As I'm sure you know, the traditional journey through the Land of the Dead spans across four years: one year in transit from El Marrow through the Petrified Forest and along the highway to Rubacava, another waiting for passage in this city, a third crossing the Sea of Lament to Puerto Zapato, and the fourth overland to the famed 'End of the Line.' But what would you say if I told you that it would be possible for you to enter the Land of Eternal Rest only minutes from this very moment, instead of years?"  
  
"Quite bluntly, Hector, I'd say the Ninth Underworld is a myth, and you'd be wasting my time," I told him, dragging dismissively on my cigarette.  
  
He chuckled. "You and I are very much alike in some ways, Olivia. I believe I would say the same thing. However, there are those who believe in that so-called 'myth,' and would go to great lengths to attain it quickly. Imagine, for a moment, the classical concept of Heaven. A world without strife or conflict, where perfect fulfillment is not merely a dream, but a reality. You can see, I'm sure, what an attractive vision it is.  
  
"Humans are by nature impatient. Of course, not all of us led...how shall I put this delicately?...admirable enough lives to warrant a ticket on the Number Nine. What if those tickets were made accessible to anyone with enough personal initiative to obtain one?"  
  
So I'd gotten it right. The man was dealing in Double-N tickets. "How capitalistic of you," I commented. "Anyone with flow gets a ride." He opened his mouth to protest; I leaned over and pressed my fingertips against it to shut it. "It's my kind of system, Hector."  
  
"You aren't the only one, and that's why I got into this business. Your Max doesn't know this, but the casino is actually a front. It's a way to corral wealthy souls who might be interested in our venture."  
  
"It's an enterprising idea." And suddenly I realized where the Domino angle was coming from. "So you're counterfeiting tickets?" I bluffed.  
  
"Of course not. What kind of man do you take me for?" He looked offended again. "The tickets are all quite legitimate. My partner, the reaper Domino Hurley, has been stockpiling Double-N tickets for years. Routing clients through...let us say, alternative means of transportation has allowed him to obtain quite a collection, and now he finally has enough to begin our operation."  
  
I weeded through all the high-class rhetoric and extracted the meaning, a trick I'd mastered through years of listening to beat poetry: Domino was scamming souls out of their Double-N tickets and shipping them off on foot instead. And suddenly everything clicked into place. Ever since I'd first met him and wondered why I, a woman who'd made such a monumental contribution to Western civilization through poetry which would never again be equaled, was forced to go it alone through the Land of the Dead without so much as a walking stick. Of course, I'd done some things that weren't so admirable, but sometimes a woman has to look out for herself, and surely the gravity of my work outweighed any petty crimes I might have committed. Had Domino filched my ticket on the Number Nine?  
  
I wasn't ready yet to believe that the Ninth Underworld was a part of reality yet. But if it was, teaming up with Hector could help me get back what a lifetime's worth of words had certainly earned me.  
  
"What do you think?" Hector asked me a little nervously from the edge of my bed.  
  
I stood up, walked over to him, and leaned in to brush my mouth against his as I slipped my arms around his neck to loosen his tie. "I think," I purred, "it's a brilliant idea." As usual, the rest came naturally. 


	9. Rusty Anchor

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.  
  
Hurricane Frances is approaching, and I've spent the last few days editing these next few chapters in time to post in case my computer dies.  
  
So much depressing news lately...maybe this isn't the best time for a noir story. I'll have to write something happy soon.  
  
Oh, and sorry if the formatting's bad. ffnet has outlawed paragraphs.

* * *

Fleshless Dream

by flame mage

part II

sixth stanza: rusty anchor

* * *

"Wind pierces my hull An iceberg, a needle.  
Sweet whispered nothings "Sail tonight!"  
A storm!  
This deathbed harbor.  
By love's rusty anchor,  
Forever moored."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "Rusty Anchor"

* * *

In a previous life, I had a lover who played the saxophone. He was then what Nick Virago would become to me two decades after I died--a toy. Whatever reasons I had for keeping him around, love wasn't a part of them. But one of the sharpest memories of my mortal existence after it ended remained the image of myself standing on the balcony of my then-boyfriend's suite in Paris, overlooking the skyline of the City of Lights with my notebook in hand, while he improvised jazz on the sax behind me. For a long time after that, I always wrote to the sound of a saxophone.I couldn't say what made me think of him again just before dawn that night. Hector was breathing heavily as he slept, and I slipped into a silk robe Max had given me and walked down through the deserted club and out to the balcony. Watching the skyline of Rubacava shut down, I drank in my first cigarette of the day and considered my options. If the plans he'd told me of held water, Hector Lemans was indeed my next target. On the other hand, I'd made it this far by never playing my entire hand at once. It was still too early to break with Max--and doing so, I realized, might chase me out of Rubacava for good unless Hector was powerful enough to run Max out instead. That meant that I'd have to play them both out for a while until it was time to make my move. I sighed. The transition period always came close to being more trouble than it was worth.I couldn't remember how many times I'd done this over the years. Find a man, use him until a better opportunity presented itself, transition, start in on the next one. It was a parasitic lifestyle, but anyone who could claim it wasn't a full-time job had no idea how much work it took. My poetry and, later, the club would have provided me with enough money to make it, but surviving and thriving are two very different matters. And, aside from small-time cons like the one I'd pulled on Hector the first night he came in, I'd never sold out artistically like so many of my contemporaries. Between that and being flush with everything I'd ever dreamed of having and more, it wasn't a bad way to go through afterlife.That was the night the game began, and the stakes I was playing for now were the highest I'd ever gambled on. For the next twelve months, I would be balancing three men on a silver tray, and one wrong move could send all of them crashing to the floor.But then, I was a professional.

* * *

Ordinarily, this transition would have gone extraordinarily smoothly. Once I'd made my decision, I would gradually begin hinting to the new man that I had fallen in love with him and wanted everyone to know it, and that someday in the not-too-distant future I would leave my old lover in order to be with him. This step was usually enough to secure myself a new living space of my own--which, I explained, was necessary to allow me the solitude I required to create true art, although in reality it was merely infinitely preferable to being forced to spend every waking minute in the domicile of my beloved. At the same time, I would gradually begin the break with the old lover. This was generally easily; all I had to do was make a habit of visiting him at times I knew he would be too busy to see me and come to him after a few months saying that we had to break up because I felt we were growing apart. Alternately, I could cite my need for independence or artistic expression. My general goal in this stage was to ensure that he came out of it believing that the fault for the end of the relationship's end was not mine, but it wasn't strictly necessary. Of course, my new boyfriend was always more powerful than my own, powerful enough to protect me--almost always, which was why I'd made a mistake in the last transition of my life. Giuseppe had refused to accept that we were over and kept attempting to make attends until I'd had no choice but to inform the police and FBI of his illegal activities. This had done wonders for my status with Reuben, but he wasn't strong enough to protect me from the Family.Still, most circumstances were less high-risk, and this transition might have been so too had the geography of the affair not presented a problem. I'd dealt with two men in different locales before, but Max and Hector were equally rigid in their reluctance to leave their spheres of influence. Like most of their status, they were internally small men who clung to their power above everything else, and felt extremely insecure in any place where it was weakened. As construction on the casino began, each man began visiting the other city with increasing frequency--during which times I had to be present for both, which may have been one of the most time-consuming and uncomfortable experiences of my afterlife--but on several occasions I did have to visit El Marrow on my own.Despite the problems inherent in this strategy, however, the direct players weren't my biggest setbacks in the transition. It was the X-factors. And the first X-factor on the list was Domino Hurley.

* * *

Gunnar had also been reaped by Domino, and from the changes I once heard him describe to Alexi and Slisko, my club was designed like a darker version of the travel agent's new office. I had to hand it to the man; he had some sense of taste. We both relied heavily on modern architecture and fixtures and focused our main rooms around the nuclei of their respective businesses: his desk, my stage. The parallels, Gunnar mentioned in between spats about the true necessity of the development of the middle class, were uncanny.I laughed when I heard this, but it reminded me of Domino's involvement in Hector's scheme. So we'd both joined the winning team over the years. I had no idea what he'd been doing since I'd last seen him, though, and I didn't particularly care. As long as the machine worked properly, I didn't care much about the cogs or what oiled them.All that changed the night he walked into the Blue Casket. I'd been in the suite with Nick and was just heading back into the club to listen to a few minutes of the night's reading when I passed him. I wasn't paying attention; I was noting that the newer regulars who hadn't developed as great a tolerance for Coffin Shooters yet were starting to drop flies. It usually marked the halfway point of the evening. And so I simply strode by him, ignoring him, and it wasn't until a beat later that I heard, "Good evening, Ms. Ofrenda.""Domino," I said without turning around. "Been a while.""Nice to see you've done well for yourself.""I hear you haven't done too badly either, Daddy. Construction on the casino's almost done." I pivoted and took the chair across the table from him."I wouldn't know," he replied. "Haven't been to El Marrow in months.""Out of a job?""Into one. I'm running a leg of Mr. Lemans's operations overseas."I laughed. "Waste of time. Puerto Zapato's practically a ghost town."He leaned back, crossing his legs, and took a drink. "When I said overseas, I meant it literally.""Well, if you're making a living on a cruise ship, why come back to Rubacava? The drinks aren't that much better here, although the company might be.""Got it in one, Ms. Ofrenda. But I'm not here for the company. I had a few loose ends to tie up. Thought I'd swing your way while I was in town."As he set his glass back down on the table, I snatched it away from him and finished it off with a catlike smile. "You've always swung my way, daddy-o.""I'm not the only one," he said. He might have been looking at Nick, who had just stalked out to build himself a nest of paperwork, but then he continued. "Saw a friend of yours; last client before I left town. Guy called Charlie Taylor. You know him?"Paris. The end of the '50s. Secret meetings under Alain's nose. A saxophone. He was the one I'd remembered that first night with Hector--artist's intuition.I definitely knew him."I know him," I replied, cutting off the memory stream. "Where's he now?""His eternal reward." The reaper tossed it off like it was nothing.The end of the line. He'd never come through the club, and he would have. I did some quick calculations. Given the timing, that could only mean one thing. "He got a ticket on the Double-N." Domino nodded. I snorted. "He must have had to pull a lot more strings than I did. Sure you don't swing the other way?"He ignored that. "I'm not really supposed to reveal what's in the files, but I'm on a leave of absence, so...the man played a mean saxophone, apparently; gave a lot of free concerts in Paris. The powers that be figure he did something good for society, something like that. Tipped the balance in his favor."Charlie. Charlie had gotten a ride on the Number Nine just for sucking a reed. What was the part of the equation I was missing? Certainly I'd done more for the arts in Paris than slinking around the back alleys honking on a twisted piece of metal. Why had I had to walk?"Enthralling," I snapped. "Tell me, what was the point--""He's not the only friend of yours I've met," Domino interrupted me. "Your old buddies from Columbia. New York City in the '50s, remember? Jack, Allen, William...Neal? You DO remember. They all took the Number Nine too."This was like a nightmare.Why was I still here? Half of the cats back in NYC had sold out. Certainly my work had more artistic merit. Certainly--no. No. I hadn't done anything wrong. Their racket had been targeting me all along.That was the point at which I decided. I still wasn't ready to put much credence in the fool's gold of the Ninth Underworld, but even fool's gold glimmers, and your hand still feels empty when someone steals it. I was sure now that my Double-N ticket had been filched by Hector Lemans's racket, and I was going to get to the bottom of the matter. I'm not a woman who's often accused of having principles, but now it was the principle of the matter.And now I was sure that the power shift to Hector was the right move. Whether he'd been responsible for all those long years I'd had to struggle through before reaching the top or not, moving toward him would be moving up. In this world--or the next one.All of this crossed my mind in the span of time it would take someone with eyelids to blink. "Did you come here to sell me a Double-N ticket, Hurley?" I sighed, resting my chin lightly on my knuckles."Me? No. Making you think wouldn't hurt, but I'm just here to catch up on old times, check the place out. I'm headed back out to the edge of the world before Calavera arrives there.""Calavera?" Not that I would have admitted this, but I seized upon the change of subject. "He was headed after that gone chick who took off a few months ago."He nodded in recognition. "Mercedes Colomar. Another client of mine. I assure you, she's in good hands.""I don't care whose hands she's in," I told him. Then it hit me. Calavera was working for the LSA. Domino had been ripping Number Nine tickets from his clients. They were both after this Colomar woman for one reason or another. Unless they were both in love with her--and looking at the smirking reaper across the table, I had the feeling that theory didn't go far--which meant... "But she was a Double-N candidate, wasn't she?""Bingo," he replied, applauding. As it happened, the reading had just finished and everyone around us was snapping their fingers; with one motion, they all turned to look at the moronic outsider who was killing their atmosphere. He raised his hands in self-defense and they turned around again, muttering."Listen." I leaned forward across the table. "Calavera's working with some underground revolutionary organization called the Lost Soul's Alliance in El Marrow. The leader is a man called Salvador Limones. I think they know the game."Domino pulled back and chuckled to himself. "Always did have a knack for getting in there and screwing it up." He stood, shaking his head lightly with an almost affectionate condescension. "Well, I'll take care of him. Hold down the fort for me here, okay?"He turned to go. Behind him, I laughed and shook my own head. "Until the next power shift, hep cat." 


	10. Nuevo Marrow

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Is everyone reading "The Martzona Case"? Only two chapters in and I'm already hooked. If you're not reading this on ffnet,  
please come and check out all the interesting things people are doing there!

* * *

Fleshless Dream 

by flame mage

part II 

seventh stanza: nuevo marrow

* * *

"Evolution, form to function 

Revolution, no compunctions

A new day dawns with gaudy sun

Another era has begun..."

--Olivia Ofrenda, "Nuevo Marrow"

* * *

Rubacava in her heydey was like a beast of prey that slumbered during the day, deceptively stagnant, and awoke with flashing eyes when the sun went down to stalk her quarry with a feral neon grace. Calling it the city that never slept is inaccurate, but it was the city that never slept at night. The night Hector's casino opened at the base of the DOD building was the day all that changed. It was the start of the power shift from Rubacava to El Marrow. It was the beginning of the end.

On the surface, everything was humming as always in Rubacava that night, but the real players weren't on the scene. Max packed up and headed for El Marrow before the fog lifted, bringing with him a large portion of his entourage, Nick Virago, and me. I remarked snidely that our motorcade alone spanned the entire distance between the two cities; Max was not amused. He was strangely uptight that night, and that made his lackeys uptight because they knew it meant trouble for them. Only I seemed to be enjoying myself.

I'd been to El Marrow several times since my arrival there, but even I was surprised by how much it had changed in the few months since I had last seen it. The skyscrapers were lit up as always, but now there were bursts of color everywhere. It could have been Times Square, downtown Paris, Shinjuku. Neon lights, signs, open doorways, clubs, bars, cafes, shops, streetlamps...it was an unusual splash of modernity in the Aztec-influenced city, and El Marrow hadn't yet adjusted to to the contrast.

The headquarters of the Department of Death, with its huge facade, had always been the most imposing building in the city. Now it was even more eyecatching, garnished with chrome and gold lights cleverly arranged to spotlight the entrance without looking gaudy. Hector had learned a few things from the Casket after all.

No, more than a few. I amended the statement as the doors were whisked open by almost-unseen doormen to reveal the revamped lobby. The carpeting and tile had been redone and the walls repapered with the same teal and tan covering, but aside from that the main part of the room was as it had been the last time I'd seen it: classy, businesslike, elegant but understated. Hector had been unobtrusive with the new construction at the rear of the building, and the casino entrance fit so seamlessly into the design of the rest of the room that I had to stop and ask myself if it hadn't been there before.

As soon as we stepped down the wide hallway and the doors to the lobby closed behind us, though, there was an immediate paradigm shift in the design of the place. Right away, we were in the heart of the casino. Everything was brighter, flashier, more vivid. I could still see the upscale teal-and-tan at work, but now there were bold strokes of red incorporated too, with gleaming brass banisters and hardwood paneling lining the staircases. I knew that environment--especially colors-- had a strong effect on the human mind, and even a few moments after walking in, I was feeling energized. Merely standing in the room had a stimulating, bracing effect. I knew that it would make Hector's high rollers feel big. And that that sense of importance and wealth would put them at ease back in an environment they could feel at home in, and they would buy his tickets. This scheme was almost failsafe.

Almost.

He gave us a tour of the new facilities, from the main casino lobby where we'd been standing to the slot machines--I hated them; the decor there was sleazy and it was patently obvious that the room was only there as a cash cow--to the card tables to the roulette wheels to the bars and lounges. Our entourage--Max, Hector, and their respective hordes of beautiful people--eventually retired to one of the last of these, Hector's version of Max's High Roller's Lounge.

"Well?" Hector asked, leaning back with some effort in his massive armchair and directing the question to Max. "What do you think of the place?" 

"The casino?" Darling Max always was quick on the uptake. "It's great, pal. Just beautiful. I love it. Don't you love it?" Here he turned and looked at the entourage, most of which was standing behind him ready to respond on cue. The gesture told me that he was still feeling insecure. He knew he might be outclassed here. The entourage nodded in unison.

"And you, Olivia?" Hector's green skull swiveled toward me. "I'm afraid I haven't quite managed the elegance of your establishment, but I hope that in some small way I have been able to emulate it."

Had I been less aware of the side on which my bread was buttered, I would have asked him which element of this place reflected the Blue Casket in any way: was it the gaudy brass fixtures? Perhaps the cheap vinyl coverings on the bar stools in front of the slot machines?

Then, a casino couldn't be expected to follow true aesthetic standards, in the same sense as a man like Hector couldn't be expected to tell a real poem from a seductively painted fraud. Unlike the Casket, people weren't here for the atmosphere; the atmosphere was here for them. And this casino fit its clientele: sophisticated on the surface, but cheap and shallow within. 

It was perfect.

"I love it, Hector," I replied.

* * *

"Really?" he persisted. "You don't think it's a bit too...gauche?"

"Form matches function," I replied swiftly. For example, Hector, darling, your form is a textbook illustration of a man who is required only to hold the purse while I pull the strings. "I think it's a beautiful casino."

"Not as beautiful as you are, Olivia," Max cut in, leaning over to kiss me. I pulled away, murmuring, "Max...all these people." It let me save face with both men.

"I agree," Hector said, and I heard the edge in his voice. "If this establishment holds a tenth of the beauty of the lovely Olivia Ofrenda, then I will have achieved all I could have asked for."

I rubbed my gloved fingers against the side of my skull, a classic geisha sleight-of-hand that made men think I was blushing. Since I couldn't remember ever blushing in my life, I'd gotten a lot of mileage out of the trick.

Max almost growled. "Nothing could even come close. Not even my kitties."

"I believe we were speaking of the Altar, not your 'kitties,'" Hector said a bit icily.

"The Altar?"

The larger man turned carefully to stare the other one down. "Why, yes. Didn't I tell you? That's the name of this establishment. It's quite a fitting one, too, if I do say so myself. You see, on the traditional Mexican Day of the Dead--"

"--families set up altars with offerings for their dead relatives," I interrupted, glancing at Max. "Altars called 'ofrendas.'"

The chill of death flooded the room instantly. There was dead silence, except for the sounds of the soft jazz being piped in from some unseen speaker and Max's saliva swishing as he chewed on the end of his cigar.

Hector cleared his throat. "Well, yes, Olivia, thank you. I thought it quite proper. For the newly departed souls who pass through, this casino is something of an altar on which an offering is placed. The offering of...eternity." In the form of Double-N tickets. But you don't care to share that detail with this buffoon, do you, Hector?

Perhaps because you know that tonight is his last stand?

"Whatever. Anyway, I think it's a great little place. If it does as well as my joint, I'll have to start thinking about opening up a little place of my own here in El Marrow."

I shot a glance at him in amusement. Open a new club in this town? Property values in El Marrow, already astronomical, were skyrocketing. Somehow I doubted that even Max had the financial resources to start a fledgling business of the size he must have in mind around here.

Especially without the money that Nick and I had been skimming off the top of his operations for the past two years.

Nick was seated, as usual, on Max's other side. I could tell that he knew what was going on, but he made no comment as he withdrew another cigarette from his new case and lit it. He was smoking, I was smoking, Max was smoking, Hector was smoking, the entourages were smoking. Everyone was smoking. Everyone was tense. The room was almost blue with smoke. There was a poem there somewhere.

"By all means, my good man, you simply must!" Hector cried in false joviality. "In fact, I believe there is a prime location right across the street." He lowered his voice, the way sinfully rich men always do when they discuss money. "The asking price at the moment is a mere 4.5 million for the suite! Pocket change for a man such as yourself."

Pocket change indeed. I'd taken at least twice that sum from Max in the previous two years and watched as careless accountants were sprouted for it. He could no longer afford to toss that change into fountains.

"Absolutely, Max," I chimed in. "I think it's a fabulous idea. In fact...perhaps I'll open a little place of my own around here. This town could use a little culture, don't you think?" This last to Hector.

"Certainly," he agreed. "And if you ever find yourself in need of any assistance, my dear Olivia, you mustn't hesitate in the slightest to ask. After all your help with the Altar, the least I could do would be to respond in kind."

I gave Max the Cheshire cat smile. "The triumvirate. Max, we'd own this town. And with the two biggest cities dominated by our clubs...we'd own the Eighth Underworld. Can you imagine it? Perhaps I'll get myself a penthouse suite uptown..."

"Absolutely not!" Max finally exploded. There was silence again as everyone stared at him and he tried to recover. "I mean, I don't think it'd come off, hon," he corrected himself. "Why don't you leave the business decisions to me? If you want a bigger place in Rubacava, I can build us a mansion or something down by the water. That'd be better anyway, huh?"

Silence again. I glanced over at Max, who was chomping nervously on his cigar, his eyesockets fixed on me. Hector had made a steeple out of his hands and was tapping his fingers together, making small clicking sounds.

And I shook my head slowly.

"Poor Maxie," I said, still smiling. "That's always been a weakness of yours, darling. You simply lack vision." I swept my cigarette holder away from me, dismissively.

"Now, Hector, on the other hand..." "...is a man who knows opportunity when he sees it," Hector finished. "And this is an opportunity."

"Indeed it is, darling," I agreed, turning back from him to face Max again. He was staring at me with his jaw hanging open. The cigar fell from it and dropped to the floor, where it died.

"Olivia..." he spluttered. "Olivia...you can't mean--"

"I can and do, Max." With one quick motion, I stubbed out my own cigarette. "It's over."

"For each end, there is a beginning," Hector intoned. He motioned to two members of his entourage, who immediately stepped forward and helped him heave himself out of his armchair and to his feet. He offered me his arm. "Shall we, my dear? It is opening night, after all."

"But of course." I stood as well and took the arm. "The night is young, after all, and I'm sure that the beautiful people have been waiting for you to make an entrance."

"None more beautiful than you, Olivia," he murmured, leaning in to kiss me. When we broke, he turned. "Do feel free to stay as long as you like, Max, old boy," he added. "No hard feelings, I'm sure. This is the way the game is played between men like us." He and the entourage started for the door.

As I was stepping out of it, I turned back to look at Max. "And this is the way the game is played by women like me. Goodbye, Max." And with that, my new boyfriend and I swept out to begin reigning over our new empire, leaving Max sitting there stunned. His jaw was still open.


	11. Dead Weight

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

I'm sure everyone has already read this a million times by now, but there's a brilliant novelization of the game (I think it's easy to find, but one version is here: ). It's very well-written and has influenced me a lot, so you should check it out if you haven't already.

* * *

Fleshless Dream

by flame mage

part II

eighth stanza: dead weight

* * *

"The crest of every wave was an affirmation

you and I, ascending the ladder

locked together.

Looking backward,  
Moving forward,  
I saw you become dead weight.In death my mistakes still have a life of their own.  
You're all the same."--Olivia Ofrenda, "Dead Weight"

* * *

From that night onward, Rubacava began changing.At first even I didn't realize it, although I'd always known that it would happen. Max's Rubacavan empire had been on the decline ever since Nick and I had started embezzling the money, but my absence only compounded the problem. To a large extent, Max simply stopped caring. The air was slowly being let out of Feline Meadows and the city.People started moving on. The docks began to get busier than the clubs on weekday nights. It took months, but one by one, my regulars started to disappear.I'd been expecting it, of course. I knew that if Max's business took a dive, Rubacava would take a dive. For the moment, I wasn't particularly concerned. Most of MY business was taking place in El Marrow--or rather Nuevo Marrow, as Hector's expensive PR firm was beginning to call it. The city was sucking the life out of Rubacava; as one withered on the vine, the other was bursting into full bloom. Over the course of the next six months, Hector very quickly contracted and opened two new clubs and several restaurants, and other developers began to follow suit. Soon, downtown Nuevo Marrow was a sea of neon lights and bars and people. I knew and accepted that the balance of power would have to shift, at least temporarily. But I was unwilling to give up Rubacava. It was going to be my throne.Two afternoons a week, a plane was sent to the lonely stretch of highway outside Rubacava to whisk me away to where the action was. Being so close to the center of operations provided me with a crystal window through which I could see everything that went on in the Eighth Underworld.I knew it, for example, the moment Giuseppe set foot in the Land of the Dead.It had been more than thirty years since his men had shot me down in the streets of New York. Apparently he had lived to a ripe old age, although one visit back on one of my more bitter Days of the Dead told me that most of the money had left him, probably for expensive wine and expensive women. Hector managed to charm some secretary into giving me a copy of the file, which also told me that Giuseppe had spent those three decades fleeing the FBI and finally landed in a dilapidated villa in Sicily. And died there of lung cancer and obscurity. Pathetic.I'd been waiting for that night for a long time. And so I was standing in the casino when he came down, dressed in a cheap suit that didn't even bear a passing resemblance to an Armani. I pitched my voice a little high so he wouldn't recognize me and sidled up to him, managing to convince him to take me to dinner. I seduced him easily--and then shot him. The look on his skull when he finally recognized me as I levelled my sproutella gun at him was worth waiting three decades for. He bloomed pointsettias. The petals were the color of the leaves that were falling in the city the day I died.It's the tinge of irony in revenge that makes it so sweet.Slowly, I began to learn about Hector's operation. At first I was only able to sneak an occasional glance at his paperwork, but within a matter of months I knew the contents of his inbox better than he did. He left his account on the DOD computer server open if distracted while working, and as soon as he was asleep I stole out of bed and started the hunt.Initially, my searches were fruitless. It wasn't until I happened onto the work order for Domino's car that I managed to make my way into his folders and find the files of his old clients.My file was a dead end. It said what I expected the artless half-wits of the DOD beaurocracy to say about my life: a brief account of my formative years in Mexico, followed by a more detailed rundown of most of my affairs and several minor acts that might be considered criminal in the eyes of the legal systems of various nations, and virtually nothing about my work. And the final analysis flatly proclaimed that I was going to be hiking, and was in fact lucky to have avoided being handed a scythe and a cloak myself.Of course, I knew the files had been doctored; Domino and Hector couldn't afford to leave a trail if their racket was going to work. Just to be sure, I checked Charlie's file--and stopped dead. He was listed as a Double-N recepient.Their records were incomplete, then. Or maybe a few clients had to get through the system properly to avoid getting the conspirators busted. Either way, there must be a logical explanation as to the whereabouts of my Number Nine ticket.I learned about Domino's operations at the Edge of the World (not to be confused with the End of the Line, although I had about as little credence in the idea that the world really was flat) as well; in fact, I, not Hector, was the one who received the e-mail from him when Calavera arrived. Amusing how cretins with their lofty principles would go to the ends of the earth for something as illusionary as love--but somehow Calavera and that woman and Salvador Limones were all connected. Idealistic pushover Calavera may have been, but he wasn't a complete fool. I closed the message and remarked it as new for Hector, and for some reason I wasn't surprised that that was the last anyone in the Eighth Underworld ever heard of Domino Hurley.I'd meant to ask him about my ticket, but I had plenty of time to pursue other leads. With the drop-ins and casual regulars filtering out, most of my remaining clients were the die-hard radicals like Alexi, Slisko and Gunnar. They were talking more and more about that Limones cat. According to their conversations, the LSA knew what was going on behind the scenes and was working to get cheated souls like me what they deserved.It was an intriguing prospect, and several times I was tempted to go find Limones himself and ask him what the truth was. But a revolutionary, I'd learned, is only useful to you if he's on the winning side of history, and you are only useful to a revolutionary if you have something he needs. I would bide my time with Hector, gathering information, before making my move toward Limones. If the LSA was going to topple the DOD, I would feed them intelligence straight from Hector's personal files until they could checkmate him--and until I became Limones's lover. If Hector was going to be the victor, I would get close enough to Limones to become part of the inner circle, and then drop him right into Hector's hands. Either way, one man was going to own El Marrow when this match was over, and I was going to own that man.

* * *

Nine months to the day after Hector's casino opened and I broke up with Max, the decisive turning point finally came. Throughout our relationship, Max had been funneling money into the Casket; when we split, I had Hector's best lawyer serve Nick a letter in very cordial Legalese informing him that if the checks didn't keep showing up on time, we were going to buy Feline Meadows out and turn it into a shopping mall. The money was paid....for six months, and then it stopped. For those six months, I was under a constant barrage of attention from Max, pleading with me to think about what I was doing, I was making a mistake, he knew we were meant to be, on and on ad nauseum through several cigarettes. I refused to see him, accept his communications, or allow him into my club; eventually I had Hector's lawyer send Nick a restraining order. All of a sudden, there was silence. The visits, the letters, the incessant calls, all of it stopped. So did the checks.I'd sent various legal communications on freshly engraved letterhead, but I still heard nothing. On that night, when Max missed the deadline for the third check in a row, I finally gave up and paid him a visit.The place had certainly changed since I'd been there. It was a Friday night, still warm in early August despite the sea breeze, and the track was dark and deserted. A year before it would have contained a larger crowd than any other single location in the Land of the Dead.  
Pathetic.The main entrance was shut down, so I walked back to the Blue Casket and took the elevator up to the cliff. The giant cactus loomed overhead, a massive ominous phallic symbol silhouetted against the night sky. There was a poem in there somewhere as well, albeit a very Freudian one. Perhaps I would buy the old Calavera Cafe as well.I was taking the long way around--I knew the ground level side exits might be open, but I wanted time to think. The cliff district of Rubacava between the Cafe and Feline Meadows had always been the quiet side of town, but most of the time there would be someone wandering around--drunks or lovers or lost tourists, anyone. The streets were deserted tonight. Thin streams of light piped out of the jail and the morgue, but that was all until I reached the bridge and had to shield my eyes. The LOL tower is the security checkpoint for the Olivia II, the shuttle that crosses the divide between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead on the Dia de los Muertos. I doubted Max would rename it now. He would continue to cling to his desperate illusions of hope for as long as humanly possible.The security guard at the LOL checkpoint let me into the track. She still recognized me, but I had no concrete memory of her until she opened her mouth and started talking about Manny Calavera. "I've wanted to tell this to someone forever," she droned, "and I thought maybe you'd understand, Olivia, you've probably dated your share of jerks--""Let's leave Maxie out of this, shall we?" I cut her off smoothly as the door clanged open and I stepped into the silent hallway. "Why isn't the place running?"She shrugged. "Maximino hasn't felt like opening up lately. In fact, I haven't even seen him, not like I used to catch him all that much. Mostly when the place opens, that lawyer of his is handling things, but mostly it doesn't open. I have been--" she stopped and looked at me to make sure I got the joke, "--dead bored."Now I remembered her. The type that never shuts up, and she was always talking about Calavera. Wasn't her name Connie or something like that? "That's great," I lied without bothering to make an effort at it. "Anyone around?""Just a couple other security guards," she replied. "Actually, I bet they're probably all down in storage filling their pockets again. You want me to work the elevator buttons for you or something?"I recognized this ploy; she'd latch onto me just to have someone to talk at and never let me leave. "I think I can manage," I told Carol. Or whoever she was."Are you sure, Olivia? Because it's not like I need to be up here. Y'know, we should hang out sometime. I hear El Marrow's got some great clubs these days. We could go out dancing, maybe meet some guys..." I slammed the door on Carrie-- or whatever her name was--'s face, and slid a fresh cigarette into my holder. For a few minutes I just stood in the plush hallway that led to the High Roller's Lounge, letting the nicotine work itself into my system. Then I continued up the elevator, through the darkened lounge, and straight through the open door of Max's office.

* * *

The lights were off, as they often were, but tonight there was no brilliant glare from the track below to illuminate the room. It was only the moonlight that set off Max's form against the desolate arena. He was slumped forward facedown on his desk, next to several empty bottles of Jack Daniels.He would be completely sloshed by this time, assuming he was conscious or alive. "Max," I said loudly, not bothering to ooze. "where is my money?"There was silence for a few seconds, and then, "Olivia?" He raised his face off the desk to look at me. "Olivia, honey, is that really you? I knew you'd come back.""I came back for the cash, Max," I said sharply. "I haven't seen a dime from you in three months. I have a club to run, you do know that.""Olivia..." He spoke as if he hadn't even heard me. "I missed you, you know that? For a while there, things were really looking bad. But I guess I knew everything'd be okay, babe." He slammed one meaty paw on the desk and heaved himself up.I backed away. "You're drunk, and I'm not interested in reconciling. I am here for only one reason: I want the payments to which everyone involved has agreed I am legally entitled. Some of us don't intend to let our business ventures slide.""I'm not drunk." The words were slurred. He began to slip off the desk slightly; if I hadn't known better, I would have said that his hands were sweaty. Violently, he replanted them, thrusting himself to his feet. "We've been through a lot together, huh? You and me?""Max, where is the money?"He lurched up and around the desk, staggering and almost tripping before he groped the edge and hauled his corpulent corpse up again. "The airship--you know I was gonna ask you to marry me? I had it all planned out, even bought the ring and everything. We coulda had the wedding right down there on the track...""Max, _where is the money_?"Now he was only a few feet away from me, arms outstretched. "...you woulda made such a beautiful bride, Olivia. I coulda given you anything you wanted...didn't I always give you everything you wanted?""Max, WHERE IS THE MONEY?""Olivia..." he moaned, and I could have sworn I thought I saw a single calcified tear fall from one of his eye sockets as he lunged for me, "I love you."The bullet lodged in the left side of his torso, directly over where his heart should have been. He looked at me once, gurgling--and fell. The roses were already starting to bloom.Impassively, I watched as the thorns ripped through his cheap suit and blood red flowers blossomed down the length of the skeleton. The soggy cigar landed on the floor and fizzled out in a pool of saliva. I could hear the strangling noises in the back of Max's throat before the stems shot their way up between his jaws. As a final macabre touch, two pure white roses sprang out of his eye sockets. Hector's hybrid experiments had apparently been successful.I slipped my sproutella gun back inside my trench coat, stepped neatly over the body, and opened the desk drawer. Inside were the three checks."Can't say I'm surprised," a voice said from the doorway. Nick Virago stepped into the room and looked down at the rose-covered corpse. "I always knew you'd come back to clean up.""I'm getting predictable, then. How dull. I'll have to shake things up a bit," I replied coolly as I shut the drawer and came around the desk to face him, the body in between us on the floor."You may have to work a little harder to do it than you're used to. I doubt even this will shake Rubacava up much these days." He gestured to the rosebush."It will soon. Hector and I will take the place over. In a year, you won't recognize it.""I won't have to." He looked at me levelly through the bluish haze of smoke both our cigarettes were producing. "I'm leaving.""You're what?" I demanded, thrown for once."I'm leaving. I have a ticket on the Number Nine two days from now."I stared at him. "Why? Why not become Hector's personal lawyer and gain even more power than you already have? This place could be yours, Nick. Why would you give up that kind of reward for a pipe dream like the Ninth Underworld?""That darling boyfriend of yours convinced me," he said flatly. "For a long time, I was like you. I never looked beyond the next rung of the latter. But sooner or later, that ladder has to end. There's a destination. This may be it.""You can't possibly be serious.""I'm one of the most powerful men in the Land of the Dead. Where is there to go now? You're right; I could take this place over, become a businessman myself. But for what? So I could end up like Maximino?"I was silent. He continued, "If you like it this way, you win. I'm not going to sit here and wait for you to tire of me. I'm going to get out and get what I deserve while the getting is good. Enjoy the top alone--you clawed yourself there that way."My laughter came out too harshly. "Almost poetic.""There's no poetry in this, Olivia. There never has been. There's nothing in this life.""And surely the bards of the ages are singing the songs of angels at the end of the line?" I challenged him.He inclined his head. "Perhaps I'll send you a postcard and tell you.""You're a fool. You know you're only lying to yourself.""One of us is." He looked at me. "Goodbye, Olivia.""Goodbye, Nick."I could have said far more to him, but I didn't have to. We both knew everything that was there between us, and it was more than cigarette haze and a sprouted corpse.In the end, he'd been just like Maximino.Striding briskly with my composure regained, I stepped past Max and Nick and left all those years of manipulation and nights in bed behind for the last time. It was time to move on. The next rung of the ladder was within my reach. 


	12. Sayonara Neon

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Again, I own the poem, not the premise. Actually, I came up with an idea for a GF sequel fic that might work...not sure yet if I'll try it. If VampireNaomi lets me, though, I'll probably write a fic exclusively for her new site Sweet as Mango,  
which is all about Olivia and Nick. Yessssss... 

Oh, by the way, the Beats mentioned in this chapter were real people, although obviously you're not going to find the fact that Olivia had an affair with Neal Cassady in the history books.

Fleshless Dream by flame mage

part II

ninth stanza: sayonara neon

* * *

"I've lived aeons at nightfall here where the scene and the sex and the smokes are all that exist.  
And the dynasties dying in the rise of mine meant nothing until recreation by my words.  
My words that made and destroyed this city.  
  
She giveth and she taketh away.  
  
And as ashes die to ashes,  
this is no longer a battlefield. It's a tomb.  
  
With departures of 'sayonara neon'  
I leave the land of death I killed."  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "Sayonara Neon"

* * *

With one finger, I had brought Rubacava to its knees. 

The town got dangerous after that. Rubacava had always been home to the real underworld of the Underworld, so to speak, but now it ran deeper than petty affairs like extortion, prostitution, or minor drug trafficking. The police chief Bogen was mysteriously sprouted while investigating Maximino's death--the murders were rumored to have been committed by an associate of Hector Lemans, but no one dared say it out loud.

Hector was convinced that we needed to focus on Nuevo Marrow first and then resurrect Rubacava once the entry city was under our thumb. He wouldn't do anything to cool Rubacava down, and so things quickly spiraled out of control. There was another string of riots at the docks. Cries of "revolution" rang through the streets. Between the political radicals and the mobsters, the crime rate tripled in two weeks. Finally, even my most hardcore regulars stopped coming altogether and hightailed it for Puerto Zapato. Officially, the cops had the town under lockdown and curfew, but that was a joke. The simple truth was that it was no longer safe to walk the streets of Rubacava at night.I didn't regret what I'd done; it had had to be done. I knew my city would come alive again if I were only patient. But still and inexplicably, I found myself missing the old days. I wanted my newfound power to start feeling like power. Every night for the next three months, I stood alone onstage in the empty Casket and imagined myself reading my latest work to a full house. My voice running like a velvet ribbon from the microphone, the wild snaps of applause, Jak on the bongos and the band getting started again, the long hours ahead with Nick. Once, walking in downtown El Marrow, I even thought I saw him. I was strangely sentimental about the glory days of Rubacava. I missed the banter and the electricity. I missed the spotlight.Ironic that the final turning point would happen on the Day of the Dead once again, in the form of a memento from those glory days.It was two AM. I was sitting alone in the center of the club, drinking in the silence and writing. Empty chairs at empty tables. It was a scene that had played out many times since Max's death, and tonight I was ready to give up. I was tired of sitting at home like a good girl and waiting for something to happen. It was time to hit Nuevo Marrow.I sighed."What? No reading tonight?" a man's voice called abruptly from the doorway, cutting into my thoughts."Read poetry in my own club? That would be like this whole place was just a big temple set up to worship me," I replied, feeding him the standard line. "The Casket's closed. Get out of the streets before you get a dozen long-stemmeds through your skull.""I'm all skull. Wouldn't make much difference." I looked up to see none other than Manny Calavera leaning over the railing of the entrance balcony, watching me.I shut my notebook and stood. "Calavera? What are you doing here? I heard you went POW in Zapato, daddy!""Well, Hector Lemans tried and missed; now it's my turn. I'm headed to El Marrow to put him out of business." His voice was the same and yet not the same--there was something grim in it now. Perhaps the edge of the world had done something to him.Hector Lemans. So Calavera really was on to the operation then. I knew from the e-mails Domino had sent before he disappeared that Hector knew about the LSA's plots. He must have sent some of his own agents to kill Calavera, perhaps at Puerto Zapato if he'd moved quickly enough. And, apparently, Hector had lost that round.And Calavera was going after Hector.Calavera, who was part of the LSA.Which just might be the one group in the Eighth Underworld tough enough to take on Hector Lemans and come out on top.This was my kind of party."Manny, that place is changed; you don't know what you're getting into." I fixed him with a sideways smile and then added in a husky voice, "I'd better come with you.""Why?" he wanted to know. "I know you, Olivia. What's in it for you?""A little action." I stretched, catlike, and catlike eyed him across the empty room stretching like a battle line between us. "Take a look around you, Man. That Lemans cat is a vampire, and he's sucking all his blood from Rubacava. These days, everyone who's anyone is in El Marrow.""So why aren't you?""I've been trying to protect my own. A lot more has changed since you took your vacation than the state of the nightlife in El Marrow. This place is a mob town. I'm getting out--" yes, I could indulge myself and quote Nick Virago a little, "--while the getting is good.""Okay, so why should we take you?" he asked. "If El Marrow is as dangerous as you say, why should I add to the risk by taking another person?""I can help you." I started thinking fast. "There's an organization there called the Lost Souls' Alliance that wants a piece of Hector Lemans as well. Get me in, and I'll get you in. I have my own reasons for wanting Lemans shut down.""You know the LSA?" Calavera looked incredulous.I laughed. "Ever since I saw those letters of yours, Man. I hear the word on the street. Salvador Limones and Manny Calavera, the revolutionaries who are taking the DOD down from the ground up--the underground up, actually, if I'm not mistaken. I've been watching you for a long time."See, one of those tickets is mine."He was standing there, just looking at me. Finally he gave a helpless shrug. I smiled. "Just give me a minute to get ready." And with that, I picked up my things and swished back into my suite. It wasn't until the door was closing that the cat finally let go of his tongue and he called after me, "Okay, but if you hear a loud explosion anytime soon, the trip's off!"I laughed and kicked the door shut with the toe of one boot. For a few minutes, I heard him prowling around in the kitchen, and then the sound of the main doors shutting heavily. As soon as I was sure he was gone, I reached for the phone and started dialing.

* * *

I had just hung up when I heard an extended sequence of loud noises, including several bangs, a deafening metallic clang, several seconds of gulping, and a moan that sounded suspiciously like it could have come from that obnoxious tangerine demon that used to play piano at Calavera's club and tear up Max's track on his off-days. A lesser immortal might have been alarmed by this progression of events, but professional nightclub proprietors tend to take things like this in stride. I calmly secured my sproutella gun and a few extra rounds inside my coat, checking as always to make sure that they didn't ruin the line, and swiped on another quick coat of lipstick. I has just finished locking the club down when Calavera came back to escort me to my chariot....that old hot rod. I should have guessed.They'd been keeping it in Max's garage, and it looked like it had been booby-trapped. With a trail of dominos, no less, and something told me I had an idea whose work that was. So much for tying up loose ends. Standing next to the car were the demon and a woman clad in cheap furs--that must be the infamous Mercedes Colomar."Meche, this is Olivia Ofrenda. She owns a club here in town," Calavera said by way of introduction, confirming my suspicions. "Olivia, Mercedes Colomar, an old client of mine. We're headed back to El Marrow to get her the ticket on the Number Nine she deserves.""Charmed," I greeted the woman briefly as I lit a cigarette. "I've heard so much about you. I hear the three of you took a vacation to the edge of the world.""And back," Calavera added. He still sounded grim. "Everyone ready to go? We could get to El Marrow in a couple hours if we get started now." The demon retched loudly, as if to punctuate the statement."Mmm," I replied, calculating. Calavera and the chick were definitely close. I might still be able to seduce him if I had to, but the girl wouldn't like it, and after spending several years chasing after her he wouldn't like anything that the girl didn't like. I'd better keep my hands off and concentrate on convincing them that I was a great ally in their noble revolution. Only two things interested me in this situation--their leader and my ticket. I let her sit next to Manny.The Bonewagon--that was what they all called it--had apparently begun its life as a DOD company car and been wrenched into its present form by the DOD company demon, Glottis. I liked it; the flames were a nice touch. And it rode surprisingly well for the hot rod from hell. Within minutes, we had left Rubacava behind and were flying down the road to El Marrow.  
"So, Olivia," Calavera began conversationally when I'd gotten used to the ride, "what's this story about a Double-N ticket? I wouldn'ta pegged you as the type.""Cold as ice. From an ex-reaper, no less," I retorted to buy time, but I didn't want to make him mad. He had been a reaper, after all--it was entirely possible that he already knew what was in my file. There was no sense in lying. "There's really not much to tell. I was a poet then--are you familiar with the original Beat movement?" They shook their heads like mechanical dolls. "Then I'll give you the back-of-the-box version. It started with a few friends at Columbia University in the 1950s--people like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg--and then a handful of other people they knew, like the notorious Neal Cassady." Who I had special reason for remembering. "I was part of the inner circle.""That's odd." The Colomar woman tilted her head and looked at me. "I read some of their work while I was volunteering at a homeless shelter in New York once--it was part of my training, a way to make me feel what these people had been through. I don't remember ever hearing of you."I laughed. "I doubt you would have. I had some trouble with that group--bad breakup. Later, my work began to attract attention and I started gathering funding--" from my lovers, but I was only giving them the salient details here, "--so I could continue. Most of those cats were still drinking and watching the best minds of their generation being destroyed by madness in the streets. They accused me of selling out...and erased me."But I had bigger fish to fry, after all. During my lifetime, I worked in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Rome, Chicago...all over the world. My work was the unclaimed crowning achievement of the Beat Generation. Its impact on society and 20th-century literature as a whole was staggering, at least in the most influential circles. And Domino Hurley and Hector Lemans stole the eternal rest it should have won me."Why was it so strange to think of this after all these years? Remembering my life only made more of it surface--how I got to Columbia. Those years with my mother in Mexico--my father was a wealthy American customer of hers; I never knew his name. Perhaps he'd been a lover of mine over the years. I remembered standing barefoot in the dirt and the sweltering heat, swearing that I wasn't going to become like my mother. When I was seventeen, I found my first lover and got out of Mexico. In the states, I replaced him briefly with a member of the Columbia admissions board. I went to college, established myself as an up-and-coming literary genius, and started climbing the social ladder.I'd never written about any of that.Calavera was saying something now. "...won't have to worry about Domino Hurley anymore. He got pretty chewed up back there at the edge of the world." Mercedes winced; she must be one of those weak, clingy types. I hated them, even more than I hated the men who fell for them. Why had Calavera been so obsessed with her? She didn't even look as if she could handle a gun.Calavera, on the other hand--he had killed Domino Hurley. Domino hadn't been the sharpest Coffin Shooter in the batch, but he had been a grifter. Calavera jumped another notch in my estimation. So he could be forceful as well as subversive. I should watch out."Sounds like you kids had an interesting field trip," I commented."Oh, yeah, lemme tell ya," the demon piped up from the front, yowling over the roar of the engine. "We got this job workin' on a ship, and I was in charge'a the engines--" here it paused to make motor noises with its mouth, "--and you shoulda SEEN what I did to 'em, man, it was sah-WEET...""And we made it as far as Puerto Zapato before Hector's agents caught onto us and sunk our ship at the Pearl," Calavera interrupted it. "That's where Domino was keeping all the Double-N clients who made it as far as Rubacava Port.""We 'jumped off' the ship there," Mercedes explained, shuddering.Calavera patted her hand, leaving his there a little longer than he needed to. "We managed to escape with all the other prisoners and get to the end of the line, but the gatekeeper wouldn't let Meche and the others through without their tickets.""And so now we're heading back to El Marrow to exchange these," Mercedes yanked a suitcase out from under the seat and opened it up to reveal thousands of gleaming golden Double-N tickets, "for the real thing."I picked one up and rubbed it between my fingers. "How can you tell these our counterfeit?"  
"They're not moving," Calavera replied swiftly. "Real Number Nine tickets get agitated around human souls. Your ticket and Meche's would be sticking to you right now if these were real."I'd bluffed Hector with counterfeit Number Nine tickets, but now it seemed that they really existed. Why? Where was the angle I was missing? "What would Hector and Domino need with fake tickets?""I dunno, but they're selling them to their moneybags clients," Calavera told me, taking the ticket back and shutting the case. "And the gatekeeper's not buying it. Your old buddy Nick Virago bought one, didn't he?""And...?""...and his train dove straight off the tracks into a pit of fire," he said. "These phony tickets aren't getting anyone into the Ninth Underworld."I turned to stare at him. He appeared completely guileless.Violently, I stabbed my cigarette against the side of the car. The demon howled about the chrome, but I didn't care. That fool. Why hadn't he listened to me? If he had stayed, he could have taken the track over. The two of us could have saved Rubacava!...why hadn't he listened to me?"Manny, what are we going to do when we get back to El Marrow?" Mercedes was breaking into my thoughts again. I forced myself to focus once more on the situation at hand. There would be plenty of time to rail at Nick in poetic form later.He turned to watch the road as it flew by. "We're gonna go talk to Sal right away. Then I'm gonna go settle the score with Hector and get those Double-N tickets back. And then you and everyone else he stole from are gonna get your tickets back and take the Number Nine right out of there. And I guess I'll try to get my old job back," he added glumly.And I'll try to meet this cat Limones and see if he's all he's cracked up to be, I added silently. And if he is, if I can shake myself a place on the winning team. 


	13. La Noche Final

* * *

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Another original poem here. This is written with my few years of high school Spanish, so I'm sorry if it's not entirely accurate. I've also included an English translation that'll give you a better idea of what the poem should say. The idea is a metaphorical pun on the characters' names. Fleshless Dream by flame mage  
  
part II 

tenth stanza: la noche final

* * *

"Por el dia la ofrenda solamente es de madera.  
Los ofreciendos, amarillos, brilliantes,  
son bonitos en las rayas del sol.  
Nada amenaza aqui.  
  
Por que es, entonces,  
que por la noche esos limones que duermen en las manos de la ofrenda 

se parecen como calaveras?"  
  
English translation:  
  
"By day the altar is made only of wood.  
The offerings, yellow, brilliant are beautiful in the rays of the sun.  
Nothing threatens here.  
  
Why is it, then that in the night those lemons that sleep in the hands of the altar

appear as skulls?"  
  
--Olivia Ofrenda, "La Noche Final"  
Final poem of Olivia Ofrenda; only recorded poem in Spanish.

* * *

We lapsed into a gloomy silence after that. I was contemplating my next move and the fate of Nick Virago, and it seemed that the other occupants of the Bonewagon were equally preoccupied. There was a definite chill in the air by the time we reached the Petrified Forest, and shadows seemed to threaten from all sides.

But it was not my imagination that I saw a charred and mangled saxophone half buried under the mountain of bones in the beaver dam.We reached the outskirts of Nuevo Marrow around one AM. As I had known it would, the light caught our attention long before we made our way out of the forest; in the year since Hector's first casino had opened, the entire town had turned into a sprawling neon carnival--Las Vegas squared. It was simultaneously appalling and enthralling."Looks like Hector's taken over the whole town," Manny said, sounding awestruck."He hasn't had much resistance," I replied as the demon maneuvered us out of the edge of the forest and down the slope toward the city center. "There's only one small group who oppose him, and they live out on the fringes of the city."As soon as the words left my jaws, we were surrounded by masked men aiming sproutella guns at us. Had I not realized who they were, I would have had my own gun out in an instant, but I decided that it might not be wise to be introduced to the great Salvador Limones as an armed terrorist."Places like this, you mean?" Calavera asked wryly as he stepped out of the car, arms still above his head.

* * *

They put the car in hock in the sewers and escorted us underground to what I assumed must be the LSA headquarters. If I was right, we would be beneath the DOD building--probably a few floors under the casino. I was armed; I could get out if I needed to. Knowing this, I felt strangely comfortable as I was hustled into the dingy little office."I hope they're not huring Glottis," Mercedes murmured to Calavera."Ha!" I laughed, largely for the benefit of the disinterested secretarial-type in combat fatigues. Where had I seen her before? Her typewriter-pecking didn't even slow. "Shows what you know about their group! Their leader is a great man who--""Manuel Calavera. We meet again."--had just walked in the door.He was very tall, also clad in camoflague fatigues, and something about him screamed 'authority figure' and made me think that this was a man I could trust.And therefore, a man I could trust to take a fall very easily if I wanted him to."I see you have found what you were looking for." Limones nodded to Mercedes. "How fortunate for you to arrive now just as we, too, are about to achieve success. Our army has grown, and right now our top agents are in Hector's weapons lab, about to close in on the enemy right in his own den. I couldn't have done it without you, Manuel."Hector was in the lab? This could be bad. I'd been careful about keeping the paper trail low; with luck, the LSA wouldn't be able to trace me to Hector. If they caught him...well. I'd have my answer about which side was the winning team."Trap!" The word burst out like a gunshot from the door as a man staggered into the room from behind us. I whirled around to see the vines bursting through his body from the bottom up. "It was a trap!" he shouted, his voice hoarse.Mercedes gasped and Calavera started forward, but Limones stopped him. "Stand back! There's only one thing to do." With one strong motion, he grabbed a fire axe from a holster on the wall and severed the man's legs from his upper body. A single blow. The raw power that must have gone into it was amazing.Mercedes was still gasping for breath like a frightened rabbit when the man hopped up on his arms and saluted. "Thank you, sir! You have saved me, but more than that, you have enabled me to continue to serve the movement."Limones waved that aside. "What did you say about a trap?""Hector uncovered our agent in his weapons lab.""No!" The leader sucked in his breath.Just then there was a crackle as a small TV monitor to one side of the room came on. On it, I could see the snowy image of Hector. "You idiot, Bowlsley!" he was bellowing. "Your new lab assistant is a SPY! Haven't you ever heard of a BACKGROUND CHECK?!"Internally I sighed in relief. The game was still on."What?" Calavera started to ask, but Limones cut him off."No time to explain. Now I'll have to take matters into my own hands." He started for the door, but I saw my chance and thrust myself into his path, my skull two inches away from his."Take me with you," I begged breathily. "I've longed to be of service to your cause for years."He looked at me for a long moment, and I was struck with a sudden vision of the intense, soulful eyes that must have filled those sockets a long time ago. Then he jerked his head once toward the door and strode out. I followed. It was time for the showdown.

* * *

I consider myself a highly literate woman. By this point, I had spent more than fifty years as a professional writer, and I had a very wide range of words at my command. Only one of these words, though, could aqequately sum up a man like Salvador Limones: intense. His stare was intense, his manner was intense, his stride was intense. This last, paired with the fact that his legs were extremely long, was giving me trouble as we made our way down the sewer to the place where his agents had left the Bonewagon."How much do you know about Hector Lemans, Ms...?" he began, opening the door of a nondescript black town car and gesturing for me to enter."Ofrenda. Olivia, please.""Olivia." The word rolled off his tongue in a subconsciously seductive way I had never heard outside of Mexico and had never expected to. I climbed into the car, he started it, and we started pulling out of the sewer."Not much. I've been operating alone for the last few years, ever since I first heard about his scheme. Most of what I've heard comes from scraps--things I overheard in a club.""Then I should explain." He turned out of the alley and merged into the city traffic. I'd learned long ago that gamblers were rarely the type to go home on the Day of the Dead; Nuevo Marrow was even more crowded than usual tonight. "The mission we are about to undertake is extremely dangerous, but it will have immeasurable value for our revolution. Hector has the Number Nine tickets in his possession. We must gain entrance to his residence outside the city limits, secure the tickets, and dispose of Lemans."So Hector was at the greenhouse. He had a penthouse suite in one of the high-rises in the city center, but he'd built the greenhouse on a hill some miles outside of Nuevo Marrow as a trophy. The hillside was covered in flowers, millions of vivid, richly-scented blossoms of every possible color and description.Every last one of them was fertilized with human bones.In fact, the great Maximino himself had a humble spot at the base of the hill. Hector had hired a photographer to come out one afternoon when he and I were together and take a picture of me sitting in the meadow, picking...roses.My call and the incident with Bowlsley had tipped Hector off, then. He would be watching for an agent. The only way to get the tickets--and the real story behind them--would be to go in alone."It sounds simple enough. How are we going to get the tickets, though?" I asked."I do not know." Limones took the exit to the freeway and accellerated. We were only ten or fifteen minutes away now. "Perhaps he can be compelled to surrender them at gunpoint. Perhaps we will be able to locate them without attracting his attention.""Salvador, if the rumors are true, this man has sprouted more than a thousand people." Far more than a thousand, and the rumors were more than true, actually, but knowledge wasn't power at the moment. "I don't like the odds, and the LSA can't risk its leader. I think you'd better let me try my luck alone at first. I can be..." I shot him a sideways smile over my shades, "...very persuasive."He hesitated. "Are you confident, Agent Ofrenda? There is no room for failure in this mission.""I can do it, sir," I told him, trying to sound like the agent back at headquarters. "But I'll need a weapon."He was silent for several minutes. Finally, we rounded a bend in the road and stopped at the base of the hill. Limones shifted hard into park, removed a loaded sproutella gun from his pocket, and handed it to me. "Then the fate of the revolution rests in your hands, Agent Ofrenda. I leave it to you. Viva la revolucion!""Viva la revolucion," I replied softly as I started the long trek up the hill, slipping his gun into the other side of my trench coat.

* * *

It occurred to me that Hector might be slightly on edge tonight, so I knocked at the greenhouse door. There was a harrumphing sound from inside before it was opened and Hector's green skull looked down at me. "Why, Olivia...! This is quite a surprise; I hadn't expected you until tomorrow.""I know, darling," I replied, "but we need to talk.""Well, by all means, please, come in. You must excuse me; I just got in myself." He held the door for me and I slipped into the greenhouse. "I was in the city, dealing with some...unexpected issues that have just come up." I'd noticed the helicopter sitting out on the pad; he would have had to come that way to beat us the way Limones had been driving. The traffic must have held us back."Would you like some tea?" he babbled, bustling through the rows of flowers. "I'd be delighted to--""Hector." I cut him off. "Where are the tickets?""I beg your pardon?""Don't play dumb, darling. You've been selling counterfeit Double-N tickets. What I want to know is where the real ones you stole are."He was still for a moment, then let out a long sigh and came back around to face me. "How did you know?""Our old friend Calavera.""Coincidentally, he's the one who currently has possession of my tickets," Hector sighed again. "I just returned from the DOD building. Calavera has taken the entire suitcase containing every ticket I have.""Why are you selling fake tickets? What are you doing, photocopying the real ones?" I asked sarcastically."Partially. After all, true tickets on the Number Nine are like hen's teeth. It's taken me years to steal these--and think how much more difficult it was to get them in all the years before the casino. But with false tickets, the supply will always be able to meet the demand. In fact, that old lawyer of Maximino's bought one just this morning.""What?!" I demanded, less coolly than I should have."Oh, dear me, what was his name? Nick Virago? Yes, he arrived from Rubacava several months ago; said the town was dying and he was looking for a larger piece of the action. I believe he contemplated buying property here, but last night my agents finally convinced him to put his savings into a Number Nine ticket. He left on the 7:56 train this morning. I'm sure at this very moment he's enjoying the rewards of the world to come."Nick had been here for three months? Then it had been him I'd seen in the city that day.And he had thought about staying.And he had left less than a day ago.He'd lied to me that night in Max's office when he told me he was getting out in two days. Nick Virago had betrayed me.Had Calavera been lying about the train?"What if I told you that the fake tickets weren't getting souls into the Ninth Underworld?" I asked. "If I said that the trains were sending those passengers to something like hell?"Hector threw his head back and laughed, nearly dislogding his fez. "It isn't as if the customers are coming back to complain, Olivia, dear! It's no concern of mine where they go after departing Nuevo Marrow. I intend to get the real tickets back, and when I leave, I'll be using an entire suitcase full of them to ensure my passage."So that was it.Hector was stealing tickets and selling fake ones--cheating souls twice--to hoard tickets to get himself into the Ninth Underworld. To tilt the scales in his favor by balancing all his less virtuous acts with thousands of entire lifetimes of virtuous souls.I thought of Charlie and his mangled saxophone in the Petrified Forest--souls who should have taken a four-minute trip to paradise and had lost their lives a second time on the way. I thought of Nick Virago's train diving into a pit of fire off the tracks within walking distance of eternity. I thought of my own ticket, somewhere in that suitcase with Calavera.And I smiled.Hector was getting out. When he left, I would be in charge of everything he had. All I had to do was shut the LSA down tonight, and all of it would be mine.And their leader was sitting, completely unarmed, in a car at the bottom of the hill. 


	14. Grim Fandango

Disclaimer: Grim Fandango and all characters, locations, and events contained therein are the property of LucasArts. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

This is it, Grim Fans; the end of the line. Last chapter. Thank you to everyone who read and reviewed (especially VampireNaomi, for all your support!). Maybe this hasn't made you like Olivia any more, but...well, I hope you at least enjoyed the trip. Oh, and the information about Mictlan is correct to the best of my knowledge, although Mictlan isn't really analogous to the Christian concept of Hell. However, GF does have strong roots in Aztec mythology. Fleshless Dream by flame mage  
  
part II 

eleventh stanza: grim fandango

* * *

"With bony hands I hold my partner 

On soulless feet we cross the floor

The music stops, as if to answer

An empty knocking at the door.

It seems his skin was sweet as mango 

When last I held him to my breast

But now we dance this grim fandango

And will four years before we rest."

--Olivia Ofrenda, "Grim Fandango"

* * *

I leaned over to kiss Hector. "Thank you, love. Knowing that you're safe puts my mind at ease. I have a little business to attend to in the city, but I'll be back soon." With that, I turned and walked back down the hill of flowers. "Manny has the tickets," I told Limones, who was waiting expectantly in the car. "Let's head back to El Marrow. I want to make sure the tickets are secure before we go after Lemans. His agents are sure to make a move against that suitcase unless we keep it safe." "If you are sure, Agent Ofrenda, then I must defer to your judgement," he replied as he started the engine. I glanced at him--he was so sure of himself. He trusted me instantly. This man believed absolutely in everything he was doing. 

"Why are you doing this?" I asked as he began the drive back. "Why worry about another world that may not even exist when you could have everything you wanted in this one?"  
"Do you not say, 'A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush?'" he asked. I nodded. "I do not believe that. Money, power...all are immaterial next to the true treasures of the world to come, Olivia. The Ninth Underworld, the land of eternal rest. Peace--until the end of time. An end to this weary toil, these struggles. Have you never felt as if you are getting nowhere, no matter how hard you fight?"

"I have.""Then you know why we fight now. Even if, as you say, the Ninth Underworld is an illusion, so, too, must this world be. I have spent lifetimes wandering through illusions. Like all other souls here, I seek rest, even if I must find it in a dream."His bony hands on the wheel were steady. So was his voice. Still that complete self-assurance. I couldn't believe I was actually being taken in by this, as if I were...one of the unwashed masses.  
"I believe, however," he continued, surely, "that the Ninth Underworld does exist. After all, it has been prophecied for centuries by the Aztec in Mexico--""Stop right there," I snapped. The roughness in my voice surprised me for some reason. "I've heard this fairy tale before. The dead go either to the sky or to the underworld, which has nine levels. They spend four years in the land of the dead before moving on to Mictlan, the last of the nine layers." He nodded, and I shook my head. "No. Do you not understand? Mictlan is a cave filled with eternal darkness. Even if your Ninth Underworld exists--and I don't put any credence in it--it isn't paradise. It's hell."The car coasted to a stop. We stood dead still in the center of the winding one-lane road, the two of us alone in the middle of nowhere. Slowly, he spread his white hands out like doves separating. "Even so, Agent Olivia Ofrenda...is not the hope of salvation all we can seek in this life?"Perhaps I screamed as I shot him.

* * *

It was a point-blank shot to the side of his body. He convulsed as the first flowers--a rich shade of purple, striking against the bone and forest green--burst out of the side of his uniform all at once. I grabbed the axe from the floor in the rear of the car where he'd left it and lunged for him, his sprouting skeleton taking the brunt of the impact as our velocity forced the car door open. We landed together in the road. His bones made a cracking sound as they slammed into the pavement, me on top of him. We would have looked like lovers if he weren't in full bloom.I drew myself up onto my knees and slammed the axe down in the center of his neck. It severed with a sick cracking sound, and his skull bounced once and rolled a few feet away to lie facedown by the roadside. The flowers pushed out all over the rest of his body and stopped. I had fallen forward on the corpse again.I lay silent for a long moment there on the road, holding the skeleton like a lover, petals crushed inside my gloves. Nothing moved. He said nothing. I said nothing. Time stopped.I had shot him because I had thought suddenly, 'If I had known you when I was alive, would my life have been different?'"Why?" Limones' skull asked me."Why?! Because idealistic fools like you ruin everything I've spent two lifetimes gaining! I gave up on your fantasies of Mictlan as a child. There is no paradise in this world or any other; can't you see that? There is nothing for you in life except what you take!"With an effort, he forced his head to roll until he was faceup, staring with blank eyesockets at the stars. "You are wrong, Olivia," he said."Shut up!" I demanded, aiming the sproutella gun at his head. "I'm tired of these children's stories. We're getting out of here." He fell silent. I got to my feet, scooped up his skull and tossed it in the front passenger seat of the open car. Dragging the rest of his body back to the car took more effort, but I managed it and laid the corpse across my lap. Then I took a U-turn across both lanes and started back toward the greenhouse."Where are you taking me?" Limones asked."Back to Hector's," I muttered through clenched teeth. "I'm getting rid of this hunk of pansies where Calavera and the rest of your little friends won't mess with it. And then you and I are going back to Nuevo Marrow so I can get those tickets back and Calavera, Mercedes Colomar, and everyone else can join you.""Why do you desire the tickets if you do not believe in their destination?"Unconsciously, I jammed my foot down on the accelerator. "I like to keep my options open."

* * *

It took some time to lug the corpse all the way up the hill--Salvador Limones had been a big man. I half-carried, half-dragged him to the top behind the greenhouse and dumped him in a bank of similar flowers, carefully concealing the body afterwards so the area looked undisturbed. Then I checked my guns carefully and made my way back to the city.The traffic had thinned out a little, and by bending basic traffic laws a little I was able to burn rubber all the way to the DOD building, where I followed the signs to the train station. I managed to arrive just as Hector's demon ravens swooped down on Mercedes Colomar, who was carrying my suitcase of Double-N tickets. She screamed and hurled the case with all her might at Calavera, who took it in the stomach and tumbled down the steps. He got to his feet and shouted, "Run! Find Salvador!" at the girl just before I careened around the corner and screeched to a stop beside him."Get in, quick!" I ordered. Without hesitating, he dove into the back seat of the town car, suitcase in hand. I squealed the tires hard in another on-a-dime U-turn and shot back toward the freeway. The fastest route was blocked off for the Dia de los Muertos festival, but I took out two traffic cones and an empty tent full of bread and went up on the sidewalk, doing eighty-five and scattering pedestrians like skeletal pidgeons. As soon as I was out of the city center, I jammed my foot to the floor. I wanted to be out of town and away from the LSA's turf when this cat figured the game out.When Calavera caught his breath, he burst out, "We were supposed to have coverage back there! Where are all of Salvador's men?!""I don't know," I replied. "He hasn't told me yet." With one hand, I picked up Limones' skull and tossed it into the backseat."Hola, Manuel," Limones greeted the other man, as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. I had to hand it to him; his composure was impressive."Salvador!" Calavera cried. Cradling the skull in his arms awkwardly, he shot his own head up to look at me. "You'll pay for this, puta.""You're not kidding. It'll cost me a fortune to get the smell of flowers out of this upholstery," I shot back. "And speaking of getting things out, I want to see whatever heat you're packing under that Halloween costume of yours. I still don't like competition from the bourgeoisie.""What if I don't want to give it to you?" His jaw was jutting out petulantly like a child's.I sighed and whipped my own gun over my shoulder with my right hand, keeping it aimed at him but just out of his reach. "I wasn't going to waste my time sprouting you, but don't push your luck, hep cat. On the freeway, no one can hear you scream.""You stole that line," he sulked as he tossed a sproutella gun into the passenger's seat."My version's better anyway," I replied.

* * *

I drove in silence for the next twenty minutes. I wanted to be able to hear everything Calavera and Limones were doing, and it was impossible to find a good bop station in Nuevo Marrow anyway. The two dead men in the backseat told no tales.The quiet gave me time to plan my next move. Hector would want to be the one to deal with these two himself--he'd probably have his own plans to use their skulls as hanging planters. Sending Calavera to a second death first would give me a little time to reclaim my own Number Nine ticket before visiting my beloved with Limones' skull.I wasn't sure why the ticket was still so important to me. It couldn't have been that Limones' words had swayed me. It was just his utter conviction that he was doing the right thing, that this futile hope of his was worth dying for. I wasn't Nick Virago. My ticket would be my own, and it would be real. I had to know.I parked in the same spot at the base of the hill and picked up Calavera's gun before I got out of the car. I opened the rear driver's-side door and jerked the gun toward the greenhouse. "Time for you to swing, Daddy-O," I ordered Calavera. "Let's see you walk."He climbed out, leaving the skull behind in the back seat. The expression on his skull was dazed as he stared around him. "These flowers...all people Hector has sprouted?!"Naive soul, that Calavera. Had a man like that really been a reaper? "Hey," I told him, smiling, "when you're on top like my boyfriend Hector is, you make a lot of enemies.""You know, you have really bad taste in men.""No," I corrected him, gesturing with the sproutella gun for emphasis, "I have a taste for really bad men. There's a difference." Why is it that power and wealth are always so misunderstood by the peons of the world? Getting ahead has never been inherently evil. Had these people never read Rand?He was still hesitating. "Scat, man," I hissed, clicking the gun into place in the direction of his skull. "Time to face the music."Slowly, he turned and started up the hill. I kept the gun aimed at him until he had made it to the top and was at the door of the greenhouse, and then I slid back into the back seat of the town car and grabbed the suitcase. "Enjoying yourself?" I asked Limones as I got out again."When justice prevails," he replied cryptically.The man could have been a beat poet. I locked Calavera's gun in the trunk and set the suitcase down in the grass behind the car. On my knees, I clicked it open and waited. The tickets were fluttering quietly, but not one flew at me the way I had expected.What?I picked one up and rubbed it between my fingers. It didn't stick. There was no reaction whatsoever.Why?I took off my gloves and started sifting through the tickets with the tips of my fingerbones. I went slowly at first, then faster and faster until I was tearing through the case, tossing handfuls of priceless paper destinies over my shoulders.Where was my ticket?I had to calm down; I'd been too much on edge tonight. Regaining my composure, I stuffed all the tickets back in the case and began to go through them again, slower this time.Nothing!"Come on, shake it for me, baby," I whispered. "One of you must be mine." There were vague noises behind me, but I ignored them. Was Hector stockpiling more tickets somewhere? He'd said the suitcase contained every one he had, and I could believe that from him. How like that fool to put all his golden eggs in one basket, especially now that the goose was dead.My ticket...it had to exist. It had to be there. I knew it!Suddenly Calavera's voice rose behind me, too loud. I leapt to my feet and whirled to see him leaning into the backseat of the car. He was talking to Limones.Why hadn't Hector sprouted him? I was sure that Calavera had gone into the greenhouse, but it was possible that he'd hidden there and then returned. Now I'd have to waste time shooting him myself. Thanks for nothing, Hector dearest."Hey! Get out of there!" I ordered, jerking my gun out of the inside of my trenchcoat and jamming it against his skull from behind. He crawled out slowly and backed to one side, hands in the air. I kept the gun on him until he laced his fingers behind his head, and then I slipped into the car and grabbed Limones' skull. Somehow I felt that this wasn't the time to invoke poor Yorick."What were you talking about with the 'head' of the LSA in there?" I asked Calavera pointedly as I extracted myself from the car, my gun still aimed at him. He kept his distance, a few feet away, saying nothing. I turned to the skull in my hand. "Huh, Sal? Got something you want to share with the class?""Only this." He fixed me with those piercing sockets for a single instant. "Viva la Revolucion!"There was a terrible popping sound, and then a thin green cloud filtered out from between his jaws.The flowers burst from the inside of his mouth instantly, and I realized what was happening. I hurled the sprouting skull to the pavement, but it didn't crack. It was already engulfed by leaves.  
And then a green tendril shot out from my right eye socket.I screamed and clawed at my own face, but I was too late. The foliage was growing too fast. Two tiny blossoms sprang from my other eye socket and bloomed furiously, obscuring my vision. The vines were wrapping around my head, lashing the beret to it. Then another stem from beneath the bridge of what had been my nose in another life.Stumbling, I reached my hands out with shredded gloves to grope for something--Calavera, the axe, anything. I could find nothing. My foot hit a rock and I sprawled hard in the grass, screams that must have been my own ringing in my earholes. My jawbone cracked against metal and I struggled to grip the gun through the vines that were twisting between my fingers.And then the flowers forced their way up my throat, choking me, until they slammed my jaws apart and I spat petals, no longer even able to scream.I fired the gun now forever bound to my hand limply, but my shot went wild and my hand fell back into the grass it was growing into. I could barely think beyond the pain. Everything was going black."I'll never play my cards wrong again," I swore bitterly inside a mind forever sealed as one last green leaf choked its way out of my face. It was autumn in Nuevo Marrow. I was dead. 


End file.
